Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The return of 'God'


Remember me saying I knew where this story was going? I lied. I have no idea.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Soon this place is going to be crawling with entities...


While I was doing these ones I remembered what Arthur C. Clarke once said about any technology that was sufficiently advanced being indistinguishable from magic. I'd always seen this statement in terms of myself waking up 500 years in the future or some poor, hapless Neanderthal being reanimated from his 30,000 year long suspended animation and having his mind totally blown by the sight of a light bulb or something.
Then it struck me that we're already there and that, for all practical purposes, our technology actually is magic. But the sad irony is that almost all of us take it totally for granted.We have little magic boxes which can store the voices of people who have been dead for a century, we travel further in a day in a different kind of magic box than most of our ancestors did in a lifetime and we can sit in a chair inside a big metal bird-like magic box 3 kilometres up in the air and totally ignore a vista outside our window which would probably have reduced a Leonardo or a Michelangelo to tears of rapture. And most of us have utterly no idea what makes this possible.