A Word on Magic
I just purchased a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil is a respected futurist who has for quite some time been promoting the idea that not only is technology rapidly changing our lives, but that the rate of change is increasing over time— to the point where in a few decades we will have essentially evolved beyond our current biology and humans as we now know them will cease to be the dominant species. He has dubbed this event the Singularity, and in this book he describes his reasoning in detail.
So, I’m looking forward to reading it; so far I’ve barely scratched the introduction. I just thought I’d relate something amusing. When I unwrapped the book the other day, I grabbed a bookmark from the stack I keep in my desk drawer and went to the restroom to read a few pages. Today I read the following passage:
A word on magic: when I was reading the Tom Swift Jr. books, I was also an avid magician. I enjoyed the delight of my audiences in experiencing apparently impossible transformations of reality. In my teen years, I replaced my parlor magic with technology projects. I discovered that unlike mere tricks, technology does not lose its transcendant power when its secrets are revealed. I am often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Consider J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories from this perspective. These tales may be imaginary, but they are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now. Essentially all of the Potter “magic” will be realized through the technologies I will explore in this book. Playing Quidditch and transforming people and objects into other forms will be feasible in full-immersion virtual-reality environments, as well as in real reality, using nanoscale devices. More dubious is the time reversal (as described in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), although serious proposals have even been put forward for accomplishing something along these lines (without giving rise to causality paradoxes), at least for bits of information, which essentially is what we comprise (See the discussion in chapter 3 on the ultimate limits of computation.)
Consider that Harry unleashes his magic by uttering the right incantation. Of course, discovering and applying these incantations are no simple matters. Harry and his colleagues need to get the sequence, procedures, and emphasis exactly correct. That process is precisely our experience with technology. Our incantations are the formulas and algorithms underlying our modern-day magic. With just the right sequence, we can get a computer to read a book out loud, understand human speech, anticipate (and prevent) a heart attack, or predict the movement of a stock-market holding. If an incantation is just slightly off mark, the magic is greatly weakened or does not work at all.
One might object to this metaphor by pointing out that Hogwartian incantations are brief and therefore do not contain much information compared to, say, the code for a modern software program. But the essential methods of modern technology generally share the same brevity. The principles of operation of software advances such as speech recognition can be written in just a few pages of formulas. Often a key advance is a matter of applying a small change to a single formula.
I had just finish reading these words when I noticed the bookmark I had randomly chosen had a gold star on its tassle. Pulling it out I noticed for the first time that it was one given to me as a Father’s Day gift from my wife and son: Harry Potter gazing into the mirror at his parents.
I’ll write more about Kurzweil’s book when I finish it.
