“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Years ago, when I was in law school, renowned University of Michigan Professor William I. Miller was a visiting professor at my school, and I had the privilege of taking one of his courses. Miller is an expert on Saga-Age Iceland. The Icelandic Vikings had a surprisingly effective legal system based on blood feuds, functioning without formal enforcement institutions—police or prisons. Disputes were adjudicated by informal courts and local assemblies, with judgments enforced privately through personal honor, social pressure, negotiated compensation, and the threat of feud violence. Despite its limitations, this system maintained relative order in Iceland for centuries.

I particularly remember Professor Miller talking about the magic swords of the Icelandic Vikings. The Norse mythologies feature swords like the unbreakable, ever-sharp Gram (“Wrath”), Skofnung (“Shaver”), the sharpest sword in the north, and Tyrfing (“Ripper”), a glowing sword that never rusts. These swords were precious treasures, carried by heroes and passed from father to son. Miller explained that these magical swords were likely based on real, historical weapons.

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The blacksmiths of the Viking Age were working with low quality iron. They had no way of accurately measuring temperature or chemical composition. Almost all common swords produced by these craftsmen were either too brittle or too soft. In one Saga, a warrior named Steinthor wields a dull sword that bends whenever it hits armor:

“So then befell a great battle, and Steinthor was at the head of his own folk, and smote on either hand of him; but the fair- wrought sword bit not whenas it smote armour, and oft he must straighten it under his foot.”

—Eyrbyggja Saga, chapter 44

But very rarely, a Viking blacksmith managed, through sheer luck, to forge a blade of high-quality steel. For that to happen, both forging temperature and carbon content had to be precisely right and consistent from hilt to tip. The resulting steel blade would not easily bend, break, rust, or lose its edge; when polished, it would acquire a mirror-like sheen, appearing to glow in the light. The prized magical swords of the Vikings were, in fact, simple steel blades, made magical only by comparison with common iron swords.

It seems counterintuitive that in an era of technological change, technology literacy is in decline, particularly among teens—those born into the Information Revolution. We are spending more time online, but there is a widening gap between digital consumption and technology literacy.

As experienced digital consumers, most of us have become highly proficient at accessing, navigating, and using technological content and services. Technology literacy, however, involves understanding, evaluating, creating, and problem-solving with technology. It is about actively engaging with the tools of the Information Revolution. There are several possible reasons why technology literacy is declining, even as digital consumption continues to rise.

Technology is growing exponentially more complex. The late 1990s online experience involved PCs with dial-up access, static HTML websites, early search engines and web portals, email, and simple forums and chat rooms. Current technology involves multiple types of devices and networks, social media platforms, personalized content, multi-layered infrastructure, security and privacy challenges, and AI integration. A relatively linear technological process like downloading a file from a remote server to a local disk, turned into a complex action involving wired and wireless networking, dynamic web apps, APIs, cloud services, cross-device syncing, and content delivery networks.

Additionally, the rate of technological change continues to increase. Platforms update constantly; AI tools rapidly evolve. Maintaining a certain level of technological understanding requires constant learning and adaptation. It is easy to lose track of technology, especially given the increasing level of complexity.

Technology designers deal with these problems by hiding complex technological systems behind simple-to-use interfaces. Technology is becoming less transparent and more abstract. In the 1990s and early 2000s, to play a game, you often had to troubleshoot drivers, understand file directories, or use a command-line interface. Today, you don’t install software, you click a button in an app store; you don’t manage files directly, you expect the system to manage them for you; and if something doesn’t work, you do not attempt to fix it. For most users, technology has become a black box—you can see what goes in and what comes out but the internal process is opaque. Technology has become abstract, transitioning from a tool you operate to a service you interact with.

The increasing complexity, the growing rate of technological change, and the decreasing transparency of technological processes are trends that will persist. As the technological user experience becomes more abstract, technology literacy will continue to decline. The ultimate example of this trend is AI technology.

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AI technology changes rapidly, with products and services constantly appearing and disappearing, possibly because AI technology is currently extremely over-hyped, making the AI market unstable. The technology is so complex and abstract that even its creators admit they don’t fully understand how it works. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently wrote:

“People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

Unsurprisingly, only 1 in 5 AI users feels that they have a good understanding of AI technology. The technology is not only abstract, it is also designed to convincingly simulate human interaction, making it confusing, sometimes with tragic consequences for vulnerable people.

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The Vikings lacked the metallurgical understanding to explain why, on very rare occasions, a blade with superior properties emerged from the forge. They attributed it to magic, treasured the sword, gave it a name, took it to battle, and built a mythology around it.

As technology grows more abstract and technology literacy continues to decline, we may find ourselves, like the Vikings, depending on tools we do not understand. That is dangerous. If you do not understand the technology you are using, you cannot be sure that you are safe from security breaches, privacy violations, or fraud. You lose agency, becoming reliant on whoever designs and operates the systems you are using. You are more vulnerable, less independent, and not as free.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman likes to say that AI is magic. It isn’t. AI is technology, and we need to be able to understand it. We should make sure that technology designers create transparent technology; technology that is as easy to understand as it is easy to use. Otherwise, we may discover one day that the magic has vanished and, like the Viking Steinthor, we are left wielding a dull sword that keeps bending.

75 · 2 · Dec. 23, 2025 · AI, Culture