Sufficiently Advanced Technology

[Flyndaran]

I couldn't tell the difference between a good stage magician and someone performing real magic.
I certainly don't believe in magic, but I couldn't tell the difference.
I think that's what's meant by the phrase in discussion.

[AlexanderHowl]

I do not think you need femtotech for that level of control (in fact, femtotech would be counterproductive, as it would be unable to communicate in anything but gamma rays). Nanotechnology would do quite fine for such endeavors, especially considering that nanobots could create workable macroscale gestalts that could do 'magical' effects. For example, a few billion nanobots could create a gestalt laser with a combined output of a 1 kJ, but they would be invisible to human sight, or could 'grow' sculptures in just a few minutes.

[Black Leviathan]

"Sufficiently Advanced Technology" is one way to create magic, but magic would be the other. You could take lower TL technology with a little polish and showmanship and make it appear to be magic. Stage magicians do this constantly. TL 12 tools are going to look like magic because the interface for that technology is so evolved from our own and the appearance of that technology is so alien that we don't have the cues to understand a technology is in use. But any technology that you haven't seen before is capable of being sold as magic just by hiding the tell-tale signs that it's technology, and really that's all the Clarke Effect is, technology when you can't see someone flipping the switch.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

That rather depends on it having such an interface, and not something totally other. If Abra Kadabra's femtotech utility swarm responds to him making gestures and reciting phrases in 64th century Sindarin, you would need outside information to give that game away (like Superman's comic-book level microscopic vision, or something). If you don't have that, you have no way to distinguish it.

But that is an example of technology deliberately disguised to look like magic. You can look like you're doing magic with 19th century technology. Heck you can look like you're doing magic with Hero of Alexandria's technology. All you have to do is hide the works.

[Black Leviathan]

We actually had a very successful game that incorporated nano-tech that appeared to be magic. The game was set in Victorian London, the characters were well educated people of their time. They were travelling through a rift between London and a strange and fantastical world. In addition to exotic and strange peoples and monsters, the world was ruled by powerful, near-immortal wizards who were able to craft the world to their liking with a wave of their hand and mournful specters who repeated the echo of their living days, trapped in their haunts. Both were clouds of nano-machines, the more powerful ones were able to draw power from other sources, geothermal/solar/bio-electric, the specters were nano clouds who were unable to leave their decaying ancient power sources, slowly unraveling with time. The exotic primitive tribes were bioroid workers and pleasure toys that were left behind when humanity wiped themselves out in a genetically engineered apocalypse. The Portal had actually transported them to the exact same location in Hyde Park but in the far far future.

Part of the "magic" was technology so advanced nobody could see how it functioned or even really manipulate it in most cases, the other half was the show, setting the characters in the age of reason, making them academics who mocked superstitious people for their foolishness, introducing the idea of magic into a world that already felt strange to the characters.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

That is for a fusion reactor capable of being a semi-portable power source (TL12 power cells are probably smaller fusion reactors). At TL12, you could probably make fusion power sources the size of mitochondria if you wanted, as long as you used helium-3 as a fusion fuel. Of course, it would only have enough fuel to generate 3-4 mJ of electricity, but it would probably be enough for a few years.

Regular TL12 power cells don't last that long—though "micro fusion reactor" might work as fluff for TL12^ cosmic power cells. At any rate, I'm not clear if you disagree with my point that TL12 technology is pretty magical, even if the social implications aren't fully explored.

[Neveron]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

But that is an example of technology deliberately disguised to look like magic. You can look like you're doing magic with 19th century technology. Heck you can look like you're doing magic with Hero of Alexandria's technology. All you have to do is hide the works.

Given the direction of modern technology, I suspect that "hiding the works" is just going to come by default. Casual users of IT these days never need to say a command line interface, after all, and in the case of some mobile devices you really need to go out of your way to see one. Sometimes they're pretty much black boxes. Literally, in some cases.

Behold the Wizard of the 21st Century as they command their familiar-obelisk to answer their queries: "Alexa, what's the weather today?"
Or hey, remember Google glass? That was a thing. Apparently there were some attempts at making them controllable via hand gestures. You still get this in some other places (the Xbox Kinect, for instance), but I'm not sure that it's a particularly relevant innovation at the moment. Still, though.

So now you've got your "somatic" and "verbal" magical components. Is Bob the Super-Wizard waving dramatically and chanting spells in a fell language, or is he desperately over-exaggerating to get those darn gesture-recognition things to work and just saying "Siri, please light that guy on fire" in 26th-century English (in a carefully enunciated fashion, since Siri keeps misunderstanding his accent)?

The big thing here is lacking the context. That's fairly natural, I think, especially when you're talking about jumping forward multiple TLs (kind of a requirement for being Sufficiently Advanced, I think).

Although the idea of Sufficiently Advanced tech is that it's, well, Sufficiently advanced. If it doesn't seem like magic, it's not advanced enough yet. It's pretty arbitrary. Sometimes you can probably get this within a single tech level or so - show an iPhone to Einstein and he'd probably be baffled by it, and not have the ability to actually figure out how it works.

Heck, if I were to give it to him personally I'm not sure that I could explain to him how it works. It might as well be magic to me, really.

[DerfmeisterP]

I always understood Clarkes law, and its corollary (any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology) to be comments on narrative technique, from a science fiction author, who can limit the readers exposure to his devices (and thus their ability to test them), and in general a comment about the reference frames people use to understand the world around them (and the worlds in their books); anything sufficiently outside our reference frames is inexplicable until included by some means or another, whether by declaring 'Foul Sorcery!' or by grabbing the microscope, calipers and library on theoretical physics.

Magic and technology are, as narrative devices, are about framing the inexplicable within an otherwise explicable and (hopefully) coherent greater narrative, and our reference frames as actual human beings are similarly about equipping us with a tool set for building a semi-coherent narrative out of the world we perceive, and we are really very, very good at doing so; if we don't explicate the inexplicable by recourse to 'magic', we do so be recourse to 'science', if not that then something else will be used to bludgeon the phenomenological chaos in to a manageable shape (journalism? politics? gardening?).

Ah I might have gone a little of topic there, apologies.