Variations on Clarke's Law
Mar. 23rd, 2010 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigertoySomeone linked to this comic in a locked post. After I finished sporfling, I had these random thoughts:
Everyone is familiar with Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") A lot of people have come up with jokes or tag lines twisting it around in various ways. A piece, I'm pretty sure by Arlan Andrews, I'm pretty sure published in Analog in the 80s (probably a Probability Zero) called "Indian Summa", took a couple of pages to set up "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Berry Gehm quipped, somewhen, that "Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced." There was a fortune cookie on one of the Unix systems I once worked on that claimed "Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature."
Does anyone have any more good variations on this time-honored theme?
Everyone is familiar with Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") A lot of people have come up with jokes or tag lines twisting it around in various ways. A piece, I'm pretty sure by Arlan Andrews, I'm pretty sure published in Analog in the 80s (probably a Probability Zero) called "Indian Summa", took a couple of pages to set up "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Berry Gehm quipped, somewhen, that "Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced." There was a fortune cookie on one of the Unix systems I once worked on that claimed "Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature."
Does anyone have any more good variations on this time-honored theme?