Arthur C. Clarke, the pioneering science-fiction author who died last week, once formulated three ironic laws of ‘prediction’, the last of which read: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He should have added a caveat about how quickly we become accustomed to miracles and even learn to ignore them. Just twenty years ago, VHS video, fax machines and outsize cordless phones were state-of-the-art wonders, organ transplants and chemotherapy were fairly recent medical breakthroughs, and although the revolution in personal computing was underway, most electronic goods looked like glorified calculators rather than harbingers of our wired future.
