From Magic to Commonplace

Originally published on Tumblr.

When people see what my company does, they tell me it’s magic. I assure them that in 5 years it will be commonplace. That’s always been true of new technology, but it’s also true of any natural phenomenon we don’t understand.

I’ve always thought this change from magic to commonplace had to do with understanding, but I don’t think that’s true. In most cases it has to do with generally accepted belief, and our awareness of this belief.

About 500 years ago most people thought the Earth was flat, for good reason. It took several centuries for the news of the Earth’s roundness to make it around the globe. People accepted it not because they had any way of verifying the fact, but because most of the people they knew believed it. Gravity, and spinning globes in empty space were magical natural phenomena. Now they’re facts we’ve all accepted.

But it’s the internal combustion engine, not the Earth’s geometry, that prompted this post. I was looking at my car this morning thinking: “I more or less understand how it works, but I’d be hard-pressed to satisfy a curious 5 year old with my explanation.” This made me realize that I’ve just come to accept the idea that we have technology to control thousands of explosions per minute and use that energy to move more than a ton of metal and plastic down the road faster than humans can run. Commonplace magic.

I spend a fair bit of time thinking about data, and the increased rate at which we’re accumulating it. But I think we’re accepting things we don’t understand at approximately the same rate.

Before the invention of the transistor it wasn’t terribly difficult to explain mechanical magic with diagrams and a bit of time, time I’ve clearly not invested to really understand how pistons, turbine blades, crankshafts, etc. work together to get me from home to the grocery store.

Digital computation and the various systems we use to interact with that computation are much more difficult to explain. I run a software company, and I know that everyone in my company working together would have a hard time explaining what happens during the 30 seconds after we push our iPhones’ On button.

But now things are about to get even more complicated. Artificial intelligence – and a lot of things fall under that rubric – is mysterious even to the people developing it. They might understand the math used to build a neural network, for example, but once the network has been trained with a pile of data, they are hard-pressed to explain how a particular result is achieved from new data.

A single, rather extraordinary, person can understand and build a car.

No single person can understand and build an iPhone, but a group of people can.

No one can explain how Watson, the IBM computer that beat humans at Jeopardy, reaches its conclusions, except in vague, theoretical terms.

So now our species is about to begin accepting magic that we can’t explain, which sounds an awful lot like religious faith. This is, I think, pretty weird.