Sufficiently advanced technology is magic! Unless it's not.
Exploring the interlinkage and dependency between two seemingly opposing forces: Magic and Technology.
“ Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law is a most popular quotation that has been immortalised in the modern world via its incessant citing in books, articles, and talks, since its first appearance in the 1973 revision of his book, ‘Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible’. This final and last of the three laws professed by the scientist, author and co-writer of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ has been discussed, debated, and deconstructed innumerable times, not to forget being quoted out of context on many more occasions.
The key to this statement, as many others have also pointed out, is the use of the words “sufficiently advanced” to clarify what could amount to magic or lead to being confused with the same. To simplify, any phenomenon or occurrence that is beyond the scope of being seen as remotely possible, given the current understanding of science, can lead to it being seen or termed as magic.
In my 2017 TEDx talk, I spoke about the inter-dependency of Magic and Technology, elucidating that we were getting ready to break Clarke's Third Law. Today, the general populace's expectation of what may indeed be possible with advancements in science and technology is so high, that if a magician vanished in a puff of smoke on stage, people would easily think that a 3D hologram was in play! Owing to IOT and its “enchanted objects” all around us, we already live and experience a world where fantasy and reality are not very different. We control television, lights, and other gadgets with a mere gesture or a voice command. We wear or carry invisible devices that help us (and others) track everything around us. Indeed, we seemingly live in a realm of magic and fantasy.
The point I make in the above TEDx talk, “Magic through the ages” is that people's expectation of what technology can already do today is generally far and beyond what is actually possible. Ergo, anything that a magician does on stage can and will mostly (and easily) be explained as “technology”. We are at a point, at least with regards to stage magic, where even the most cutting-edge technology will seldom be “sufficiently advanced” enough to be seen and experienced as magic. Instead, it will be merely seen as what is possible with science, reducing magic to tech, and worse “electronics”.
The new challenge then for magicians and mentalists is to ensure that their audiences do not see their acts as achieved through hi-tech, but rather be seen as mundane and simple enough to have been achieved only through real Magic! But I digress.
The reason I am writing on this topic – and indeed one of my favourite quotes – today is not so much about what has transpired on the magic stage, as much as what has been occurring in the worlds of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was exactly four years back, in July 2019, that the world went ga-ga over a video Microsoft had released. It showed Ms Julia White, the CVP of Azure Marketing, present what they called “the magic of AI neural TTS and holograms”: a life-like 3D hologram version of Julia White appeared on stage and had a real-life conversation with the real Julia White. Confusing? Perhaps this video will jog your memory and make it a tad less confusing.
Over the next couple of years, we saw variants of this AR world via Google and Facebook (or Meta) who entered the Augmented Reality space in a big way. Most of what we saw in this time-frame was indeed most magical. Only it was already here, and so it was not anymore an impossibility, and thus not magic but a current reality.
Cut to the post-pandemic world and it appears we have made many leaps and bounds when it comes to technological advancements, especially with quantum computing and the like, birthing such magical technologies as ChatGPT and its hundred of AI variants including Bard, Bing, or (add your own favourite AI tool here). Even as the apocalyptic doom of an Ultron-type take-over of the world (you will get this if you are a Marvel/MCU geek) looms over us, we are enraptured by the wonderful ideas and possibilities of a human-made artificial intelligence. After all, talking to spirits and invisible beings is as fantastic as it gets in any fantasy land, except that — you are getting ahead of me already — this is not some “significantly advanced” technology we are talking about. We are already here!
With just a few ‘clever’ prompts anyone with access to ChatGPT is able to write a story, an academic article, a research proposal, even a thesis or book. There are many graphic-modelling variants like DALL-E, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and (add your own favourite AI graphic generator here) that create the most impressive pictures, photos, paintings, and artworks — all auto-generated by the magnificent power of AI. If this was not already enough, you have similar tools that can help generate highly-realistic (deep-fake?) audios, videos, and even films — all based on the input of a few intelligent words to prompt and guide the AI.
Notice how while all this feels and sounds unbelievable — and a few years back it would have been — it is not a problem of belief anymore, as this is all here and doable. Technology has always been the great leveller, and here it has levelled the field yet again. Only, this time round it threatens to level the field between the skilled and the not-so-skilled, the learned and the not-so-learned, the artistic and the not-so-artistic.
Whether this is good or bad is perhaps for the future to say, but there is no denying that anyone can now write a speech, article, review, or even a book, with not much knowledge of the topics and without much hold over a language. All they need is access to a ChatGPT like AI tool and the basic knowledge to use it. In many ways, this is real levelling of the world as AI threatens to question the need or existence of skills, experience, or even knowledge, and just focus on being a doer, assisted more than ably by AI.
Nobody wants their jobs replaced, especially not the creative ones that have been hitherto seen as capable by humans only. Far as the Writers Guild of America is concerned, one of their demands in the ongoing strike is that methods of artificial intelligence be used only for help with research or facilitate script ideas and not as a tool to replace them. If talent and skills are not differentiators, then what is? Is reading books and amassing knowledge passé? Is the ability to use AI effectively a skill that one can perhaps hone? Would that really be useful in the long-term?
What is perhaps the saving grace in all this is how AI even in its best forms today is a creative content generator with decent grammar. It can analyse data, summarise reports, write emails, and even make PowerPoints on your behalf. But it has also proved to be hopelessly unreliable, as it has been found to be — what can only be described as — hallucinating. Basically as an artificial creative engine its primary goal is to generate an answer. And this means it creates one if an “acceptable” answer does not already exist or if it is… well, lost for words!
Here are a few experimental articles that I generated using ChatGPT to test out its workings and understand its limits. Let’s see if you can find the gaffs, faffs, and outright lies in these otherwise wonderfully worded, AI outputs:
Technical Write-up: The Magic of UX: How the Art of Illusion Enhances User Experience
Book Review: Pratchett Colours the World of Magic and How!
Academic Article: Exploring the Potential of 'Phantom Skills': Using Positive Imagination to Facilitate Skill Development
Short Story: The Unsolved Mystery of the Oak Island Treasure
Ideation & Script Writing: The Portal Coin Trick – From Ideation to Play-Script
Did you read any of the above examples? Come on! Make the time for it. You will find that they are indeed much fun, even if they were mostly auto-generated using artificial intelligence! Also, it will be interesting for you to see if you notice the gaffs.
I, of course, prompted, guided, and moulded each of these outputs using my learnings and knowledge in each of the above topics, but still there are enough things amiss in them if you know enough about any of these topics. And that is the scary part. At first read, they all come across as a really deep, well-orchestrated article on the given topic. It is only on a deeper, second (or even third) read that you find things fundamentally wrong, or generic Barnum-like statements masquerading as academic posits.
In simple, if you are relying on it to generate any serious content — especially on topics that you are not very aware of — be doubly careful. It presents its output with such aplomb and alacrity that its hallucinations merge irrevocably with facts. Also, we have been trained over the years to accept what the computer presents to us as a truism. After all, that is why computers were invented — to compute accurate solutions.
Our piddly AI appears to have taken far less than the seven and half million years the supercomputer Deep Thought took to give the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. We have only just been categorically and with great clarity informed that the ultimate answer we have been waiting for is forty-two. It is now for us to make real sense of this answer. Where do we go from here?
Send in your thoughts…
What are your thoughts on all that is happening with AI in our world right now? do you think AI will go rogue and try to ‘correct’ our world into a AI utopia, or is it just another new tech that is the current and latest fad among engineers? How do you think jobs, especially the skill-laden ones, will be affected? Do you think life as we know it will be affected?
I look forward to hearing from you. So please do write in.
And now for the grand prize!
Don’t forget to participate in my special contest where one of you can win the most exclusive reward: The Thinking Kit. And at least two more of you can win interesting consolation prizes.
I wish you all the very best with today’s contest!
Puzzle # 2A: Halving Numbers!
According to a strange rule: 4 is half of 9, 6 is half of 11, & 7 is half of 12.
Based on the above examples, what is the half of 13?
Puzzle # 2B: The Choice of Death.
Here is another puzzle based on a medieval story (Don’t tell me you missed reading my previous letter):
A thief that has been found guilty and sentenced to death is granted one last favour by the executioner. The thief has been allowed to select the manner of his death.
The gruesome choices available on the menu of death are: - Be crushed under the weight of a five-ton stone; - Be thrown into a pit of lions who have not eaten for five months; - Be boiled in oil for seven days and seven nights; - Be poisoned by five scorpions, 10 tarantulas, and 20 serpents; - Be decapitated at full moon; or - Be eaten alive by a tribe of cannibals.
Which one of the above deadly options should the thief choose to try surviving the ordeal?
For a chance to win this contest, you have to answer BOTH the above puzzles accurately. You can submit your answers by replying to this newsletter or by emailing your responses to nakulshenoy@substack.com
The chosen winners of this contest will be announced in a forthcoming issue of Magical Musings. I will of course send you another set of puzzles to solve in my next letter with a chance to win some more exciting prizes.
Thank you for staying on and reading till the end of this letter. Do remember to send in your thoughts and feedback, and of course to suggest topics that you may want my thoughts on.
As always, there is so much more I have to tell you: from the many pseudoscientific cons that are ruling the roost, to some of my recent book reads (and listens). But that will have to wait till my next letter to you.
Stay well & stay safe.
Yours magically,
Nakul Shenoy
Bangalore, India
www.nakulshenoy.com