Technology as Magic

Reading about Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, I was struck by how they were still purely mechanical machines but already seemed to be approaching the mysteriousness of later digital computers. Not being mechanically oriented myself, my eyes glazed over looking at the diagrams of the inner workings of the machines, but I got the impression that if I stared at it long enough, or had one in front of me to take apart and fiddle with, eventually it would make sense. However, the math that went into the conception was far more subtle and had the same fuzzy quality as explanations of exactly how the internet works. That got me thinking about how our relationship with our gadgets must have changed over the past few hundred years, how before, people really understood, or could potentially understand, exactly how their machines worked and could control them. Now, only the tiniest percentage of iPhone users know how their phone works, from the highest level of abstraction down to the mechanical details of how the touchscreen functions. As we talked about in class, almost none of us even remember life without computers, so we’ve never had a sense of total mastery over our tools, but I wonder how it must feel to someone a hundred years ago whose most complex piece of technology was a Model T.