ETech07: Seth Raphael & Indistinguishable from Magic

Seth Raphael – MIT

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke.

What does it mean? We have a very very tiny idea of what technology is here. Using your hands is a kind of technology.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

I am a magician. One thing I have found when doing magic is that technologists say “there’s a hidden mic, you have a wireless transceiver.” They assume anything they do not understand is tech.

But most people think magic is magic.

I am at the MIT Media Lab, researching wonder in the affective computing lab. BA in magic and tech, MA in Wonder.

A magician friend was doing a birthday party for an 8 year old. He had cards, ropes, etc. Grand finale was pulling a live rabbit out of his hat. The kid just sort of sat there. He was packing up, and the kid was staring at the corner. Usually they want to see the hat and the rabbit, etc. Magician said “what you are looking for?’ And the kid said “I know that was a hologram — where are the lasers?” The kid had refused to believe it was magic.

This is cause for some concern.

I loved my childhodd. In fact I LOVE my childhood. That’s something about magic — it’s a state of being where we experience thigns that break our understanding of the world. Our expectations sre surpassed. Magic is ultimately about taking you back to childhood, which is why it is sad to see an 8 year old looking for lasers in a bag.

Question: what is the difference between magic and science? Anyone have any ideas?

[“Lasers! Rabbits!”]

Them ore I have done magic around tech, the more I see that techologists have become a sort of magician. Scientists do thigns that are impossible, and the layperson doesn’t know how it was done — like configuring Apache. The magician usually says “you can’t learn how to do this”, which may be the key distinction.

There are differences: how the secret is regarded. In science you let the secret out, in magic you hide it at all costs. Why is it that people don’t necessarily want to know the secrets behind magic?

Once upon a time magic was technology. The shaman was the technologist, living at the boundary between science and nature, mitigating the relationship. Going to the spirit world if you had an illness, whatever.

Ultimately in the end you are kowtowing to reality. We don’t have to deal with the real world. As long as it looks good, it doesn’t have to obey reality.

Fiction authors have no constraints
Magicians
The real world
Scientists have all the constraints

and cutting across all of them is Jane McGonigal. 😉

The shaman was at the intersection of religion and science and magic. Trying the herbal properties of plants, etc.

[shows posters of old magic acts]

This guy did experiments with billiard balls, which were magic but also science. [References the movie “The Prestige.” And a book called “Wonder Shows” which was about touring magic spectacles.]

Relgion split from magic. We have historical examples. cf the magicians working for the Pharoah in the Bible as evidence of the split. Solomon was a magician.He was smoked for pretending to do miracles.

Next split is between science and magic. And that starts to catalyze around the time of alchemy. The pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone turns into chemistry, and that’s the branch that became science.

So these thigns are inextricably related throughout history.

The birth of modern day magic was really from Robert Houdin — the namesake of Houdini. He was a clockmaker, a mechanical engineer. A mechanical tree that grew in front of your eyes [cf film “The Illusionist”]. One of his things was automata. His was renowned for its intelligence — it would cursive write out the answer to sums you asked it, and so on. (But it was a magic trick, of course).

Then came The Turk — a machine that could play chess. It beat most people. There was clearly no place for anyone to hide in it. Toured all around the world. Compare to Deep Blue — plenty of room for a person to hide in there! They even need a real person to move Deep Blue’s pieces for it! The Turk was 2 centuries ahead.

But of course the Turk WAS a person hidden within. He didn’t always play optimally because sometimes he was drunk — and that’s also how he got busted. Deep Blue has not had that problem yet.

Then there was was Electro. He was built by Westinghouse as The Future in 1937. Electro had bellows that allowed him to smoke a cigarette! Turned out that he was controlled via radio. But this is what people were imagining as the future. They created the illusion that he was doing voice recognition by speaking to him in a tilted mechanical voice.

People want to imagine what is not possible now, because we are bound by corporeal limits but our minds are not.

But two years later, the magicians trumped Elektro, answering questions posed by the audience. Magicians did help further tech. They found that he stopped working at night, and it turned out that it was neon lights causing interference.

Electricity. It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have it. Imagine how foreign it was. Electricity was used in magic shows 100 years before it was in the ordinary world. As soon as it became more commonly understood, it shifted to being about “controlling” electricity.

Cinema was invented by magicians, trying to project ghosts onto screens.

What about current tech and magic? Kevin Gough did the first computer magic in 1981. The computer guessed what cards the kids were thinking of. He had a deck of punchcards, 52 of them, and you put them in one and a time, then you stacked them up again, then shuffle, pull out a card, look at it, and the computer would then tell you which one you picked. All it did was memorize the order, then find the one that was out of order. 😉

Marco Tempest is putting magic on YouTube. He films it all on his phone camera. [cool clip of magic tricks with TVs and objects]

Fabrice Deloure: rfid in every single card, and a device is reading which card was picked. Magicians are at ubiquitous computing already. They can tell you the position of the card son a table, what people sketch on pads of paper, etc.

Jim Bumgardner.

[Asks for audience volunteers. A guy comes up]

Arthur C. Clarke has arranged to chat with us! Let’s pull him up on the screen…

Opens IM where Clarke is (supposedly) waiting.

And we need a deck of cards.

Types in “Hello Art.” A computer voice SINGS “Hi what is your name” “Would you like to see a magic trick.” “Please get a deck of cards.”

“How cute, an O’Reilly deck of cards.” “Spread them face down” “Pull one card face down.” “Now gather the rest and push them off to the side.”

“Would you like me to divine the name of your card?”

“Ooh, this is hard. Please take a tiny peek at your card.”

[Guy does]

“So difficult. Concentrate on your card.”

“Aha, it must be the 4 of hearts.”

“Thank you, please take a bow for me.”

[“What card was it?” “4 of hearts.” “really, how bizarre.”]

You guys heard of Google? Some new emerging technology.

[Gets another audience participant, opens Google.]

OK, now imagine a deck of cards, and think of any card you want. We are going to ask Google what your card was.

“The 8 of hearts.”

[types into google “what is my card”]

The top result: eight of hearts.

[screen goes black. time’s up anyway…]

Slides at : http://www.magicseth.com/etech

Ultimately, magicians have been creating wonder, and that is why we should look to them for inspiration: they have been dreaming what people dream about, that’s where we should look to them for technological inspiration.