姜峯楠 : 我不喜歡 “ 任何足夠先進的技術都與魔法沒有區別” 這句話。

原文刊載於 The New York Times，這是一則 Podcast 節目 “The Ezra Klein Show”，對談者為華裔美國科幻小說作家姜峯楠(Ted Chiang)。 他曾獲得四項星雲獎、四項雨果獎、約翰·W·坎貝爾最佳新作家獎、四項軌跡獎和其他獎項。 他的短篇小說《你一生的故事》在2016年被改編成電影《異星入境》，本文為部份節譯，並由 AI 翻譯，些許編譯

So you sent me this wonderful speech questioning the old Arthur C. Clarke line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” what don’t you like about that line?

所以你給我一篇很棒的演講，質疑亞瑟·克拉克（Arthur C. Clarke）的老臺詞，“任何足夠先進的技術都與魔法沒有區別”，你不喜歡這句臺詞的什麼？

So, when people quote the Arthur C. Clarke line, they’re mostly talking about marvelous phenomena, that technology allows us to do things that are incredible and things that, in the past, would have been described as magic, simply because they were marvelous and inexplicable. But one of the defining aspects of technology is that eventually, it becomes cheaper, it becomes available to everybody. So things that were, at one point, restricted to the very few are suddenly available to everybody. Things like television — when television was first invented, yeah, that must have seemed amazing, but now television is not amazing because everyone has one. Radio is not amazing. Computers are not amazing. Everyone has one. Magic is something which, by its nature, never becomes widely available to everyone. Magic is something that resides in the person and often is an indication that the universe sort of recognizes different classes of people, that there are magic wielders and there are non-magic wielders. That is not how we understand the universe to work nowadays. That reflects a kind of premodern understanding of how the universe worked. But since the Enlightenment, we have moved away from that point of view. And a lot of people miss that way of looking at the world, because we want to believe that things happen to us for a reason, that the things that happen to you are, in some way, tied to the things you did.

所以，當人們引用亞瑟·克拉克（Arthur C. Clarke）的話時，他們大多是在談論奇妙的現象，技術使我們能夠做一些不可思議的事情，而在過去，這些事情會被描述為魔術，僅僅是因為它們是奇妙的和莫名其妙的。

但技術的一個決定性方面是，最終，它變得更便宜，每個人都可以使用。因此，曾經僅限於極少數人的東西突然變得可供所有人使用。像電視這樣的東西 — — 當電視第一次被發明時，是的，這看起來一定很神奇，但現在電視並不神奇，因為每個人都有一個。收音機並不神奇，電腦並不神奇。每個人都有一個。

魔法本質上是永遠不會被所有人廣泛使用的東西。魔法本質上是永遠不會被所有人廣泛使用的東西。魔法是存在於人體內的東西，通常表明宇宙在某種程度上識別不同類別的人，有魔法者和非魔法者。這不是我們今天理解宇宙運作的方式。

這反映了對宇宙如何運作的一種前現代理解。但自從啟蒙運動以來，我們已經遠離了這種觀點。很多人懷念這種看待世界的方式，因為我們願意相信發生在我們身上的事情是有原因的，發生在你身上的事情在某種程度上與你做的事情有關。