If you type “technology indis…” into Google, you are instantly directed to a webpage discussing Arthur C Clarke’s third law: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. The science fiction writer’s aphorism was published in 1962, at a time when a demonstration of Google’s autocompleting search engine would indeed have seemed like sorcery.
There are plenty of other examples: electricity, the aeroplane and the telephone would all have seemed miraculous and inexplicable to earlier generations. Each of them exemplified what a technological breakthrough is supposed to look like, deservedly winning attention as they appeared.
We need to be careful, however, not to overlook much simpler technological advances. The lightbulb is a safer and more controllable source of artificial light than the candle or the oil lamp, but what really makes it transformative is its price — the cost of illumination has fallen approximately 400-fold in the past two centuries. Supercomputers and space travel get all the press. Merely being cheap doesn’t. But being cheap can change the world.