Clarke’s Third Law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Last night, I went and watched the Chicago Bears beat the New England Patriots at the new Cosm facility in downtown Detroit.
While I didn’t spring for seats in The Dome, thanks to dragging along a couple of Lions fans, I did get a chance to check it out. The massive wrap-around, impossibly high-def screen, blasting a continuous image from inside Soldier Field—both the sidelines and end zone, depending on the game situation—was even more impressive than I expected.
It was easy, even from the top with an obstructed view that didn’t fill my peripheral, to actually feel like you were inside the stadium. I have to reasonably assume that if you were actually inside that Dome, the immersion would be complete and you could easily lose yourself to feeling like you were actually there.
It felt like stepping into the future. Like magic.
But, and this isn’t a knock against Cosm or any technology… I wonder how long that will last? Not the business, the feeling of the magic.
It’s Still Magic
Working in AI, I spend a huge portion of my life working with technology that felt impossible even five years ago. And it keeps getting better, adding new features and capabilities, seemingly every day.
At this point, when I assign some work to Grady, I just expect it to work as it runs out to translate or migrate countless CMS pages, or create an email campaign from a single Word document, or just about anything else in basically no time while I make a cup of coffee.
I’ll ask ChatGPT about something, or receive a pre-game Game Day summary automatically, or plan out my finances, or plan a party with it… And it just feels normal now.
Not less extraordinary. Not less appreciated. Just… normal.
It’s still magic, but it’s becoming expected.
And that’s mostly a good thing, I think. But there’s an uncomfortable tension here, too. As technology becomes normal, we expect more from it.
We notice when we aren’t seated in the right spot and our peripheral sees the edges of the Dome and ever so slightly breaks our immersion.
We notice when our AI takes an extra minute or two to complete the task, or feels like it requires more explanation to deliver the desired results. We’ve already moved on from conversations of Prompt Engineering that once felt normal to just expecting our AI to infer our every intent, understand our every nuance. We’ve gone from marveling that AI understands our words to expecting it to understand what we meant.
As the tech improves, our expectations increase.
And maybe that’s how you know a technology has actually arrived. Not when people gather around to watch it work, but when they get annoyed that it didn’t.
Amazement is evidence of possibility. Impatience is evidence of adoption.
The progression isn’t simply from impossible to possible. It’s from possible to expected.
And perhaps that actually is the magic.
Not that technology can make the impossible possible, but that it can make the impossible commonplace.
We make the extraordinary ordinary.
