Magic and Technology

[MonkeySage]

How might the existence of magic, and its widespread use among those of talent and learning, stunt the advancement of technology?

That is, I don't think it would everywhere, but would it delay for example, the early modern era? The Industrial Revolutions?

In creating this new setting I'm working on, I'm trying to think of just how old it might be, and whether this setting might be trapped in medieval stasis because of the existence of magic.

[Anonymouswizard]

In general? By directing research away from it. Note that this means that if being a magician is more random than not that times and places with less magicians will focus more on technological development. This is especially true if magic requires Intelligence to use effectively.

It wouldn't stop the development of technology and might actually accelerate some areas. I can see a society with access to magic might have better metallurgy or the knowledge to create synthetic gemstones without knowing about anesthetics, antiseptics, or antibiotics. It's also unlike to delay an industrial revolution if all the other conditions are in place unless it's essentially provided the same thing itself.

As a general rule, magic will only prevent the development of something it already does, and only certainly prevent the development of something it does easily. In other words, the only way to stop the internet from forming is for magic to make the sharing of information easy, eventually you get to the point of having the internet, but glowing!

So if magic is easy enough that you can teach peasants to throw fire in a couple of weeks the musket might never have been invented, or firearms might never have been adopted. Because you can teach a large group of people how to throw darts of fire fast enough to make them an effective army (striking a blow against feudalism in the process).

So if a setting never develops past medieval technology it's because it either can't or doesn't need to. There's nothing wrong with setting a setting at whatever technology level you want, and even add on whatever magical developments you wish, but the chances of just stopping at crossbows and gothic plate is unlikely.

[TheStranger]

Anonymouswizard pretty much nailed it. The bottom line is that technology and magic are just two different ways of doing things with less effort. Exactly how that plays out depends on the details of what magic can do and how accessible it is, but in general people will default to the better tool for any given job. The development of magitech is also a near certainty unless magic and technology are fundamentally incompatible. For instance, I doubt we'd be futzing around with batteries in our electronics if we had magic.

Here's a related question: does the development of technology make magic obsolete? For instance, modern militaries have weapons that make any spell in D&D look like a stiff breeze and can be used remotely. My smartphone does things that the Spell Compendium never thought of. Sure, there are still some things that magic does that technology can't (teleport, healing, mind control, contacting planes, etc.). But if magic doesn't advance along with technology, it'll be surpassed in more and more ways. But then, why can you access all the world's knowledge with a cantrip now, when it was a 9th level spell 500 years ago?

[Lleban]

Anonymouswizard pretty much nailed it. The bottom line is that technology and magic are just two different ways of doing things with less effort. Exactly how that plays out depends on the details of what magic can do and how accessible it is, but in general people will default to the better tool for any given job. The development of magitech is also a near certainty unless magic and technology are fundamentally incompatible. For instance, I doubt we'd be futzing around with batteries in our electronics if we had magic.

Here's a related question: does the development of technology make magic obsolete? For instance, modern militaries have weapons that make any spell in D&D look like a stiff breeze and can be used remotely. My smartphone does things that the Spell Compendium never thought of. Sure, there are still some things that magic does that technology can't (teleport, healing, mind control, contacting planes, etc.). But if magic doesn't advance along with technology, it'll be surpassed in more and more ways. But then, why can you access all the world's knowledge with a cantrip now, when it was a 9th level spell 500 years ago?

If magic can be studied like a science then it'd probably advance much like technology does. Imagine if part of getting your phd in magical studies was creating a new spell. Obviously this depends on the magic system your working with and its respective limits though.

[Xuc Xac]

If magic spells are useful, reliable, and repeatable, then they are technology.

Technological development is hindered by other factors:

1.) Necessity is the mother of invention. The New World civilizations never used the wheel for anything other than children's toys. Why would they? What would pull a cart? They didn't have beasts of burden so there was no reason to make wheels conveyances. The ancient Greeks figured out the basic principle of the steam engine but never developed it because they didn't need it. Nobody wants to make a labor saving device if it's only going to give slaves more free time. Which leads to point 2.

2.) Money. If you don't have slaves and you have to pay your workers, then "labor saving" devices become more attractive. Not because it gives your workers more free time, but because your hourly employees can do more in the hours you're paying them. It boosts productivity. If you don't have a robust patent enforcement system, people will invent things and keep it as a trade secret. A lot of effort is duplicated by other people inventing the same thing independently because they have the same needs. With a good patent system, one person can invent it and other people can see how it works and start thinking of how they can make a better version instead of wasting their time and effort inventing the same thing.

Magic will only hold back development if it is already cheaper or more useful. A wand of magic missiles is more effective on the battlefield than a musket, but it's not cheaper. Fielding a wand requires a wielder with the equivalent of at least a Master's degree. An illiterate peasant can learn to use a musket in an afternoon and you can get a lot of muskets for the price of a wand.

The telegraph and telephone will be held back because the startup cost of setting up a network of copper wires and training operators is high compared to just using spells to send time sensitive messages. That changes when your bandwidth needs increase. When only a few people are willing to pay a wizard for a high speed message, it's not worth the investment to set up a telegraph. When more people are willing to pay, building telegraph lines becomes more attractive.

Just because "magic can already do that", that doesn't mean magic is the most effective or most cost efficient way to do it. Magic might be the best option when money is no object, so special forces units will include wizards with wands and stuff for precise strikes on special missions. But no military is going to put huge amounts of resources in training mages just to get one or two fireballs per day from each. For the cost of training that one fireballer, they could have tens of thousands of grenadiers that can throw bombs all day after a few weeks of basic training.

[Max_Killjoy]

"Mundane" technologies might "skip ahead" because the early iterations don't offer enough advantage over magic -- wired telegraph takes a lot of investment in running cable, but wireless telegraph just takes stations once the underlying science has been developed to the point that someone thinks of using radio waves to send signals.

[Bohandas]

Some technologies would be greatly boosted. Anything that runs on electricity would be more easy to power if electricity could simply be conjured up and computer science would be boosted immensely by the ability to build oracle machines

[Mechalich]

Magic can induce medieval stasis by monopolizing innovative effort while at the same time requiring immense duplication of effort.

Science and engineering build upon themselves. What one person learns a second person can use with only a fraction of the learning put in by the first. Scientists stand on the shoulders of giants and engage in collaborative effort where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's what allows for such rapid advancement. If you want stasis, magic can't work like that.

Instead, magic needs to require individual mastery. Every new wizard has to learn everything all again, from first principles, and internalize the knowledge each step of the way. This is more like learning advanced mathematics or philosophy than any sort of applied science. If the learning curve is sufficiently difficult, it will be extremely hard to progress as a wizard and only truly rare geniuses will be able to advance the state of the field overall in any way and it may take centuries for those who come later to understand just what they were doing.

You also need magic to be able to provide high levels of personal power but be highly resistant to industrialization. Wizards need to be able to take a place among the elite, but unable to distribute their gifts to the masses. One such limit is the elimination of any sort of 'magic items.' If the wizard has to be personally present to cast every spell, and there are strict limits on how often they can do magical things and how many wizards there happen to be, then the ability of magic to influence society is limited.

Further, it helps if magic doesn't interact effectively with technology, as in having a different energy source. That means any sort of capability built off of magic will end up being incompatible with mundane technologies so that the developmental tracts work at cross-purposes.

The fictional universe where both these traits apply that is the most familiar is Star Wars. Force users have to go through an excruciating training process that most fail in order to wield their powers effectively and masters cannot mass distribute their teachings to apprentices in any way. Even when some highly advanced secret is explained in great detail (like by a holocron) it still requires immense effort to master and many will be unable to learn it. At the same time, the ability of Force users to project their power is constrained. They have great difficulty acting at a distance (with some dramatic exceptions), become tired, and must personally oversee everything. It's enough power to take control of society, but it doesn't translate into technological developments. There are force-based technologies in Star Wars but they are largely incompatible with standard ones or require specialized resources (various types of crystals) that are useless for conventional purposes.

[Bohandas]

That kind of incompatibility would only be a factor in a world with no magic items

[brian 333]

The current (200 year old) technological boom we enjoy came as the result of a single idea from The Age Of Enlightenment. That ideas and knowledge should be free.

Prior to this, any innovation was hoarded and governments tried to control it. Here is an example from history: silk.

In pre-industrial Europe silk was magic, spun of moonbeams by elves who lived beneath mountains in the far East, so far as anyone knew. For centuries China spent a lot of time, effort, and money to keep the secret.

The imposition of Patents was not originally intended to secure the rights of inventors, but to restrict who could obtain certain technologies, and to insure the proper taxes were going into the royal coffers. Even technologies as simple as weaving and sea-salt production were limited in order to control the flow of money and power.

The Age Of Enlightenment postulated that human minds should be unfettered, and the only way to achieve this would be through universal education. This required more books than had ever been printed, but luckily this was also the dawn of the Industrial Age, and industrializing book production was one of the first places they began.

Technologically, the Hellenistic Athenians, the Warring States Chinese, and the Renaisance Europeans were not that far apart, and though many technologies have roots in these eras, they never resulted in the uncommonly rapid advance of technology which came out of the Age Of Enlightenment.

Why? Was it money? Political control? Lack of inventive spirit?

Nope. It was the accumulation of knowledge. Ancient Rome built huge aquaducts which, after the fall of Rome could not be repaired. The knowledge was gone, and the many decades of training master to apprentice to reachieve the lost technology were not worth the expense. There was no place to store knowledge, to record failed attempts, to explain successes, to propose new things and gain the insight of others regarding their applications.

We see things through a lens which distorts the past. Heinlein once discussed having performed the calculations by hand on sheets of butcher's paper for hurling rocks from the Moon to Earth. Then a young physicist asked why he didn't just run them through a computer. Heinlein was then forced to explain to the young PhD that in the 1950's there was one computer in the USA, time using it was very limited to computer science doctoral candidates, and it couldn't perform differential equations anyway. The young doctor had grown up with devices which could do all that and fit in his pocket.

The availability of information has exploded in my generation, so it's all too easy to google something and find a thousand how-to videos on it. Back in The Age Of Enlightenment, if one wanted to read a particular book, one had to trek across a continent to find a copy. And then hope the owner was generous enough to share.

Before information was easily accessible, one with a creative mind could certainly create innovations, but if it was a process without immediate benefit who would copy it? Without copies the invention becomes forgotten, and the next time someone investigates that idea, he is forced to reinvent the wheel. How many times in how many ages did folks play with foxfire, for example, before they invented glow-in-the-dark signs?

Even failures are necessary for learning. Silly Putty is an example of a failed experiment, and melted chocolate bars inspired another. But before the failures can help an inventor avoid or overcome them, they must be recorded in a way that allows the next generation pick up where the previous one left off. The history of Astronomy from Gallileo to modern times illustrates this, and can be used as a case study for the process in general which applies to all fields of endeavour.

Necessity has given us nothing but blisters. Libraries and schools are the mothers of invention. Without them, no matter whether its magic or science, every Master has to begin by reinventing the wheel.