I recently met up with Graeme Forbes, one of the smartest people around, for a chat that ranged from philosophy to Pratchett.
Terry Pratchett’s books had penetrating insights into how people think and act. I only wish I had come across them earlier.
One of the ways he sees philosophy, Graeme said, was as a fight against magical thinking. Magic, it turns out, is a technical term in philosophy.
There’s magic in technology as well. Arthur C Clarke wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The thing with magic is that, if it exists, you don’t need to do anything else.
Pratchett’s Discworld is a world of magic. One where there isn’t much technological progress because when you can do anything with magic why would you invent anything new, why would you strive for progress and improvement?
A more subtle problem is magical thinking. That something new will change everything, as if by magic. And the most recent focus of that is AI.
Of course, AI isn’t magic. It doesn’t solve everything. It has limitations, some temporary that may be addressed as the technology evolves, some more fundamental, such as trust, reliability and maintainability.
We need to figure out how to use it, where it works, and where it doesn’t. How it fits into the workflows that we run.
Handcrafted insight 