The Uncanniest Influencers on the Internet
In 1973, the writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated an adage meant to capture the relationships humans were building with their machines: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The line became known as Clarke’s Third Law, and it is regularly invoked today as a reminder of technology’s giddy possibilities. Its true prescience, though, lay in its ambivalence. Technology, in Clarke’s time, encompassed cars and dishwashers and bombs that could take millions of lives in an instant. Technology could be awe-inspiring. It could also be cruel. And it tended to work, for the typical person, in mysterious ways—an opacity that, for Clarke, suggested something of the spiritual. Today, as technology has expanded to include self-driving cars and artificial intelligence and communications platforms that divide people even as they connect them, his formulation suggests a darker form of faith: a creeping sense that technological progress amounts to human capitulation. To exist in an ever more digitized world is to be confronted every day with new reminders of how much we can’t know or understand or control. It is to make peace with powerlessness. And then it is, very often, to respond
