You don’t need any magic in this magic
Jonathan Creek, the protagonist of the BBC TV series of the same name, is a magician’s assistant who solves unlikely crimes using the same understanding of mechanics, engineering and psychology that he brings to the design of magic tricks for the stage.
In the very first episode Jonathan (played by Alan Davies) is reluctantly persuaded by a journalist, Maddie (played by Caroline Quentin), to perform a magic trick, and then to explain how it works. After Jonathan has duly amazed Maddie by apparently reading her mind and conjuring a name onto a piece of paper, he then disappoints her by showing her that the trick was nothing but some sleight of hand, misdirection and assistance from an accomplice. Maddy declares the trick to be ‘mind-numbingly banal’.
That’s Jonathan’s point: everyone is amazed by magic and claims to want to know how the trick is done, but they don’t really want to know the mundane reality behind the scenes.
By now, you will have realised that Jonathan may have missed his calling as a technology architect.
Technology is often compared to magic: Arthur C. Clarke famously said in 1973 that, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ We may think that Clarke was talking about visiting aliens or far distant human civilisation, but less than fifty years later we live in a world which increasingly feels as if it is full of magic: most people, most of the time, don’t understand most of the technology they use. Not only does it feel like magic to them, but it is often presented and marketed as if it is magic.
This is bad news and good news for technology architects.
The bad news is that we often have to act in the role of spoilsports. I am sure that, at some point in their career, every architect has felt like the small child in the audience who points out that the magician has a hole in his hat or a card up his sleeve.
Consultant: ‘Ta da! Cloud!’ (Architect:‘But how do we secure it?’)
Salesperson: ‘Hey presto! Artificial Intelligence!’ (Architect:‘But do we have the data?’)
Researcher:‘Abracadabra! IoT!’ (Architect:‘But do we have a common protocol?’)
Architects don’t mean to spoil the fun, but we are curious souls, and we want to know how things work. And, when you break things down and reach the fundamentals, when you truly understand how something works, you don’t find any magic. You usually find the same computing capabilities which have been around for some time, put together in new ways. Sometimes you find something that is genuinely new, but even then, it must be something which we are capable of understanding, otherwise its inventors wouldn’t have been able to build it. There’s no magic at the roots, just reality and human ingenuity.
The good news is that, unlike Jonathan Creek’s trick, reality and human ingenuity are anything but ‘mind numbingly banal’. They are more inspiring, more exciting, more world changing than magic, because they are realand because we can do something with them.
Manager: ‘So Cloud is just a bunch of servers, software and storage?’ (Architect: ‘Servers, software and storage which we can configure and command more easily than ever before and use to build everything from tiny applications to world spanning platforms!’)
Analyst: ‘So AI is just a bunch of maths and data?’ (Architect: ‘Maths and data which we can use to make predictions faster and more accurately than humans, which we can string together to produce sophisticated behaviour, and which can perform functions which we could never code as a set of rules using traditional techniques!’)
Accountant: ‘So IoT is just a bunch of sensors and connected computers!’ (Architect: ‘Sensors which we can use to instrument and digitise the physical world, and which enables us to project the effects of software beyond the screen and into reality!’)
The more technology advances, the more it will feel like magic to many people. Architects (and other technology professionals) have the privilege and responsbility to be curious, to seek fundamentals and to dispel the magic by discovering reality. Unlike magic, though, discovering how the trick works make the world more exciting, not less exciting.
