Original artwork, not a still
Profiles of the Future • 1962
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
A machine you cannot see inside behaves, to you, like a spell. The line is both a warning about astonished onlookers and a boast for engineers. It has been quoted about smartphones, AI chatbots and anything with a hidden mechanism, and it is probably the most borrowed sentence in science fiction, now so familiar it often appears without Clarke's name.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for Profiles of the FutureShow the scene
Clarke's Third Law is the last of three "laws" that Arthur C. Clarke attached to his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future, his book about predicting technology. The First and Second Laws appear in the 1962 edition. The Third Law, the one about magic, is credited to the revised edition of 1973, so it is a later addition to a 1962 book. It is Clarke's best-known sentence and the one most often detached from his name.
Sources (1)
- Wikiquote: Arthur C. ClarkeClarke's Three Laws entriesReference checked
Context reviewed
