In order to best understand the new technologies in our lives, it may be more useful to look to stage magicians than to source code.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But I’m not saying that the performances of David Copperfield and the products of Steve Jobs are one and the same. What’s important about the example of stage magic is that it will help us think about which technological deceptions should be permissible in society.

We like the deception at the heart of a Penn & Teller show, but we don’t like the idea of being “deceived” if the outcome is a negative one. Take, for example, the Volkswagen scheme to evade emissions regulations. At the heart of the plot was a kind of magician’s trick. The company’s “green” diesel cars had a “defeat device,” software that produced the illusion of a car with stable emissions behavior. Like a trick deck of cards that looks “fair” but is actually rigged to favor the magician, the “defeat device” masked the car’s reality, that it was a computer with four wheels designed to fool environmental regulators. Read more..

http://fusion.net/story/226364/what-magic-and-technology-have-in-common/