Any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic

Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Wikipedia). There's a corollary: any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic.

It's a truism that new technology amazes, awes, and astounds us. Most recently, most of us were astonished by ChatGPT. But the technology is already losing its magic.

One can multiply examples indefinitely. According to Carolyn Morgan in When Old Technologies were New (1988, p. 56), the President of the National Electric Light Association said in 1896, “One miracle has followed another until we can but wonder what apparent impossibility will be accomplished next.” During the Victorian era, “railway madmen” were thought to be activated by the sounds and motion of train travel (Atlas Obscura). The internet (and telegraphy before it, cf. Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, 1998) was going to transform society and politics. John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” made this ringing claim: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth” (EFF).

David Nye describes the American technological sublime in an eponymous book (1996). He looks at several technological achievements that filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror, including the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, the Eads and Brooklyn bridges, the Empire State Building, the Boulder Dam, the atom bomb tests, and the Apollo mission. Nye starts the book with a short history of the aesthetic sublime, and gives as the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens as examples from nature.

Weirdly, the natural sublime doesn’t seem to wear off, but the technological one does. The number of visitors to the Grand Canyon just keep growing (pandemics excepted, nps.gov) but nobody queues up overnight for the new iPhone anymore. 

Grand Canyon National Park, Total Recreation Visits, nps.gov

For me, a warm bed in winter is a magical thing; a good curry delights the senses; and the sight of a rising full moon fills me with awe every time. On the other hand, accessing any video on the planet on demand is blaah; I take automatic transmission in our car for granted; and I think nothing of chatting with my family on the other side of the world at a moment’s notice. (One used to have to book transatlantic phone calls.)

It seems that we quickly habituate to technology but we don’t habituate to sensual experiences. Perhaps that’s a way to define technology: the experiences we quickly become accustomed to, including not just “tech” but other made things like art and fashion. (This may roughly be what the ancient Greeks called techne, though there wasn’t much consensus about the term even then. According to Wikipedia it included astronomy, carpentry, farming, generalship, geometry, mathematics, medicine, music, painting, philosophy, politics, rhetoric, sculpture, shipbuilding, and shoemaking.) I suspect we habituate to technology because it’s such an essential part of our make-up; it’s of a piece with our competing cravings for novelty and stability. Nature and sensual experiences are outside us, and surprise us every time. 

It follows from this is that our experience of every technology will go through something like Helen Fisher’s three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attraction (Harvard). Gartner’s (much-criticized) Hype Cycle stages inserts a rom-com loss into Fisher’s stages of love: X meets Y, X loses Y, X gets Y back.

 

Gartner Hype Cycle (Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

We should expect every new technology to enchant and terrify us at first, and then recede into the boring background. The terrors of previous generations of technology fade as we turn to face the latest monster. 

For example, there was pervasive fear of nuclear war in the Fifties and Sixties, illustrated in films like “On the Beach” (1959, based on Nevil Shute 's 1957 novel) and “Dr. Strangelove” (1964). In 1951, Gallup asked Americans how safe they would feel in their city or community in the case of an “atomic war.” Half said they would feel unsafe. (See also Erskine, The Polls: Atomic Weapons and Nuclear Energy, 1963.) 

There have been several movements when fear about the existential risks of biotechnology spiked, including the late 1970’s when recombinant DNA technology led to fears about genetic manipulation; concerns about GMOs in the late 1990s; and the development or CRISPR and other gene editing technologies in the 2010s. 

Fears about “grey goo” (an end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology coined by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation, 1986) were salient in the early 2000s, following Bill Joy's 2000 Wired magazine article “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us” and Michael Crichton's bestselling novel Prey, published in 2002.

Max Weber borrowed the term disenchantment from Friedrich Schiller to describe the devaluation of religion apparent in modern society (Wikipedia). The German term is Entzauberung. Contra Weber, I don’t think this “un-magicking” is unique to bureaucratic and secular Western society. It occurred even in the traditional societies where “the world remains a great enchanted garden” (Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 1920, 1971:270) when technologies—like fire and metallurgy, surrounded by sacred rituals in ancient societies but not in the highly religious Middle Ages—became domesticated.