Indistinguishable from magic (Score 2)

The following snippet of wisdom is attributed to Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." You've probably seen it come by thanks to /bin/fortune. For all intents and purposes we are at that point today with computers. Now, of course, if you ask someone, "are computers magical?" they will respond in the negative. But consider how people treat computers and how people treat mystical or magical objects. Magical things are acausal, random, and only to be handled by the priesthood. Computers are acausal, random, and only to be handled by the (computer) priesthood. In this regard, the flakiness of computers adds to their mysteriousness. And even the priesthood is not immune to this. The first thing a computer programmer will do when his or her program crashes is to run it again! As if maybe this time it will work and the bug will just be gone somehow. The social implications of magical technology are huge -- without a proper understanding of what technology is and what it can or can't do (and how it should or should not behave), the general public will continue to accept buggy software and, when it crashes, attribute it to the anger of the gods.