Science fiction as reality

What’s that in your pocket? Magic or art? The near ubiquitous iPhone may be rammed with very new technology, but it is a witness of very old, even mysterious, values. Few of us understand its inner workings, even as we indulge ourselves daily with its impressive powers to astonish.

‘My life,’ Daniel Harris wrote in Cute, Quaint and Hungry, his witty critique of consumerism, ‘is suspended above an abyss of ignorance. Virtually nothing I own makes sense to me.’ This is a familiar feeling. If we had to start over, few of us would know how to light a fire, still less design and manufacture a beautiful smartphone.

If civilisations are remembered by their most significant artefact, the iPhone is our memorial. Arthur C. Clarke once said that ‘any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic’. I asked Jony (since May, Sir Jonathan) Ive, Apple’s vice-president of design, if he was familiar with this idea when he was developing the iPhone in a secret Californian wizard’s den.