incredible VS inevitable

It’s six in the morning and I’m awake in my bed. Thats because its six her but according to my body and mind it is actually 12 am. I haven’t slept that late in years. But I don’t mind. Gives me time to think.

What I was thinking about is a quote from Arthur C. Clarke:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We are visiting the NextFest exhibition tommorow and I know the Möller Skycar will be there on display. I can pretty well see the difference between this advanced technology and magic but I still think it is a sufficiently advanced technology. So I disagree with Arthur C. Clarke.

These days it seems that:

Any sufficiently advanced technology seems incredible at first but inevitable once adopted.

Incredible in this sentence means ‘So implausible as to elicit disbelief’. When I have been confronted with new technology in the past 20 years I never had the problem of not being able to distinguish it from magic. I simply couldn’t believe it would ever become a reality and most people couldn’t.

But then it atually happened and I could buy it and as soon as I had my hands on it I didn’t say ‘Oh, the magic!’ but ‘Well yes, ofcourse!’.

A few examples:

Mobile Phones: when they first arrived people hated them. They said “I’ll never get one of those”, “I don’t need to be and don’t want to be reachable all the time” and if you owned one they said “Are you important or something?”. Now, everybody has one and looking bacck it seems inevitable that it happened.

Blackberry and Google Maps: if you would have told me 15 years ago that one day I would have a little wireless machine with which I could look up any satellite image in the world, I would have thaught that to be unrealistic.. Now I have a Blackberry 8707v with Google Maps installed and I sort of think that that is logical.

Möller Skycar: in 2026 personal aircraft should account for up to half of all vehicles.  That means you and I will be flying arround in computer guided airplanes the size of small automobiles.

Sounds incredible? Then it is probably true…