Years ago, when Apple Pay was only beginning to spread, most card readers in shops still handled just magnetic stripes and IC chips. Contactless was not something you could count on.
Even so, I would take out my old Samsung Galaxy Note. The cashier would see me preparing to pay with the phone and say, “The reader doesn't support phone payments.” I ignored the warning and held the phone close to the terminal. Just as the person on the other side had decided I was the stubborn customer who refused to listen, the machine gave a short beep: payment complete. I liked catching the look of confusion that followed.
How could an old reader with no contactless capability read the information from my phone?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that line in Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. The point is not that technology is literally supernatural. It is that when we trust a system while knowing nothing about how it works, the distinction between “technology” and “magic” stops mattering in any practical sense. Show a person from a thousand years ago a phone used for browsing and calls, a printer producing sharp images, or a plane crossing the sky, and the only explanation available to them may be sorcery.
Most of us are taught that belief in witchcraft and magic is superstition, while belief in technology is not. Clarke's sentence undermines that easy division. The question is not whether we attach the label “technology” to something. It is whether we understand its operating principles—and whether those principles rest on physical laws that can survive both mathematical scrutiny and real-world implementation.
That is why the current situation with large language models deserves more than a shrug. These systems are becoming deeply embedded in what we do, and many of us neither know nor particularly care how they arrive at their outputs. If that indifference becomes the norm, we are not standing on the solid ground of science. We are living in a magical world full of superstition, only with better interfaces.
As for the question that started this: how did a Samsung phone get credit card information read by an old terminal? The idea behind that trick was genuinely brilliant, and it is documented publicly. But NFC became common, Samsung retired the technology entirely, and I no longer get to watch cashiers' astonished faces.