Magic and Wizards in the Computer Age

As we all learned in grade school, people used to believe in magic because they didn't understand the forces of nature.  Over the years science has increasingly reduced what is unknown about nature.  At the beginning of scientific advancement, when the most basic principles were determined, most people were able to understand and accept them.  As science and technology have advanced fewer and fewer people understand their more advanced aspects.  The people who understand the advanced aspects seem almost mystical to the average person.  They are commonly called wizards or gurus (e.g. he's a computer wizard).

Although people aren't often faced with making decisions based on advanced knowledge of particle physics they are when it comes to common technologies, such as cell phones and computers.  When faced with a program that is behaving badly we often find some "trick" to getting it to work.  By pressing some combination of keys or selecting some menu option or something we are able to  get the computer to do what we want it to do.  We have no idea why it was not performing according to our understanding of the manual.  We just know that it works when we perform our mystical ritual to appease the computer gods.

If you ask most people they say they understand that the computer simply executes a series of logical instructions.   The same people will acknowledge that they have no understanding how their computer performs its most basic functions.   Even people who are computer professionals only know a small aspect of the computer and are in the dark about much of the rest of it.  There are chip engineers who design the micro-processors and other integrated circuits and circuit boards that are the physical host on which the system resides.  There are operating system designers who know the interface between the hardware and the applications.  There are thousands of application domains that each have their own specialists.  Each specialist has little or no knowledge of what is in other specialties.   To each the other areas are mystical.

About 20 years ago I had a fair idea of how my PC worked, from CPU to word processor.  My understanding has become murkier and murkier over the years as computers have become more complex.  Nearly everyone has a cell phone these days.  Almost no-one understands how they work beyond the most basic concepts.  When I was a kid many people worked on their cars.  It was well within most people's ability to understand it down to a very low level.  Car motors have become vastly more complex and are now controlled by computers.  Medical science is so full of specialties that very few specialists understand what is going on in closely related specialties.  It becomes scary to think about how little the general practitioner knows.

Before science starting making its leaps and bounds magic and religion used to be used to explain what people didn't understand about the world around them.   There was a period where magic was on the wane because science explained a lot of things in a way most people could understand.  Now there more of the world has been explained but it is harder to understand.  There is also too much information for anyone to absorb.  So now people are returning to a mystical acceptance of the world as not understandable.   So many people accept that their computer is really behaving in a non-logical way.  That there are computer wizards who know some sort of magic that can make their computer behave.  That you have to blindly perform a bizarre ritual to make the technology work.  That technology behaves in arbitrary and capricious ways.  

As concepts of science and technology become more remote from the common understanding we can expect more people to treat it as mystical.  The people who have some understanding of it will be called and treated as wizards from the middle-ages.  And they will be, more than the middle-age wizard, able to control things that appear magical to average person.  (Of course there will be false wizards who have only better knowledge of what special key combinations to press without having a deeper under standing of the technology, and real wizards who really understand it.)  The age of enlightenment is ending and we are returning to an age of mysticism.

Not that long ago I had a discussion with a seemingly intelligent college educated woman.  She complained that a recent scientific studied showed that the dietary supplement she was taking did not provide the medical benefit she thought it did.  She said she felt the scientific community had let her down since, years earlier, the claim was made that there was scientific evidence that the supplement worked.   She didn't understand that the dietary supplement industry often over-states the significance of small short term preliminary studies.  And that these are not definitive.  A lot of the people who take supplements or follow the latest trends in the health-food  industry have this miss-understanding.  Unfortunately there are a number of industries, especially in the health sciences, that thrive on confusing people about what is proven science and what is just theory.