Technotheology

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

The 'Third Law' of Arthur C. Clarke

You may have missed it, but some time between the death of the 8-track and breakfast this morning technology blew past what anyone could reasonably understand. Up until that undefinable point, advancement came - at its fastest - as a swift trot. By reading magazines like "Popular Science" and "PC Magazine" or blogs like Engadget.com and Gizmodo.com, an educated geeky person could actually follow the threads of progress as they wove together to create incredible new stuff. Now progress races by at Mach speeds and no one knows how to even try to keep pace. 

As a curious kid growing up in the 80's and 90's, I could pretty much understand anything by reviewing my copy of The Way Things Work. Records had little grooves (you could almost see them if you squinted hard enough!) that bounced a needle that vibrated out your parents' unfunny comedy records. Compact discs were essentially the same thing with a laser instead of a needle, and they had MC Hammer songs on them. I could open up a computer case and poke around at the processor, the memory, and the sound board. I'm not claiming that twelve-year-old me actually knew how a Pentium worked, but I could see how the function of individual components came together to create a multi-faceted user experience. I could see the trees and the forest interchangeably. 

Even the first few iterations of the iPod and other MP3 players were knowable. Somebody just stuck a laptop hard drive in a plastic case with a graphing calculator screen and installed a rudimentary operating system on it. It was a brilliant adaptation (and shrinking-down) of existing technology to provide revolutionary access to a personal library of music. But if you had lived through the early years of the personal computer and paid attention to the shelves at CompUSA, the iPod wasn't particularly magical.

The other night, my wife and I were having a quiet weekday dinner and I wanted to spruce things up a bit. Knowing her love of over-the-top 80's music, I opened Spotify on our iPad and fired up a Wilson Philips tune (thank you 'Bridesmaids'). The amount of time between having the idea and steely-eyed lip-synching into into my fork was about fifteen seconds. 

Of course there are only about five or six evolutionary branches separating the 'magical' iPad and that old clunky hard-drive-in-a-case iPod, but it's a struggle to see the connection any more. It is far easier to accept the magic than to pull back curtain after curtain after curtain to suss it out.

Things are going so fast now though that I fully expect that relatively soon a person will be born in the backseat of a car which drives itself. Trying to understand how that person might see the world when she grows up stupefies me.

Clarke invoked his beautifully cryptic 'third law' to write exciting and thought-provoking stories set at later dates in human existence. The idea wasn't particularly novel, and it was almost always intended as either an out to allow for futuristic technologies or as a confounding element when cultures at differing levels of advancement collide. Now though, the law takes on a bizarre new importance; technology is now indistinguishable from magic for the members of the society that created it.

The common attitude of most godless scientist like myself is that eventually science and reason will win out. Younger generations have been increasingly irreligious in the developed world, and the trend is logical. In a world where man-made technologies doubles life expectancy in two generations while simultaneously drowning us in TV, mobile phones, and WiFi, it's hard to ignore the power of science. And admit it, Google is far better at answering your questions than prayer and constancy.

But this attitude might not hold forever. People don't understand how their phone works; they can't appreciate the thousands and thousands of hours clocked researching, developing, and sweating over it. When the technology that dominates a person's life feels miraculous, it might as well be. Where's the line between streaming an HD video on your phone at 30,000 feet and walking on water?

Gordon Moore is credited as the first person to frame computational evolution in the context of exponential growth, giving rise to the oft referenced Moore's Law. Raymond Kurzweil took the next step, projecting the 'law' forward to predict that man-made computers with computing power superior to the human brain will be available for $1,000 by around the year 2045. Of course such a supposition requires a meaningful estimate of human brainpower, which I'm not convinced is available at this time. 

Regardless of the exact level required though, it is hubris to think of the human mind as anything other than the complex interaction of a few trillion bits of information. Granted, that's an incredible amount of information, but to erect an impregnable conceptual barrier demanding that computers could never become conscious or have feelings or be 'alive' is folly. Of course it will happen, it's only a matter of time. (As a side note, many - myself included - see the creation of human-superior synthetic intelligence as the highest attainable achievement for our species; humanity's timeless 'children' are the only means to reach outside the cradle of our solar system in a meaningful way.)

So when the planet is covered with self-aware, de-centralized, virtually omniscient and immortal life, where will we be exactly? The phrase "God is a human invention" will have an entirely different meaning, that much is for certain.