A Mirror, Not Magic: The Global Gum Vision

I Don’t Think Your Computer is Magic

I firmly believe that the majority of the tech worker population, as bright as they are, still see most of the tools for their job as being powered by magic—just a little bit.

I’ve been solving people’s software problems for 25 years, and I am convinced that the root cause of many issues businesses face today comes from misplaced wizardly expectations. A Magical Computer has been ingrained in our culture since childhood.

Computers certainly seem magical. Like anyone else, I often have trouble visualizing how millions of microscopic switches arrange pixels on my screen. They are, without a doubt, mysterious.

So here’s the rub – if the computer is magic, it should be able to do magical things, right? It should fix your problems at work like waving a wand.

This attitude is the bane of those of us who build with digital technology every day. The best software engineers are treated like wizards and often face frustration when their perceived wizardry is revealed as an illusion. The illusion is simple: the only magic that good technologists possess is a deep understanding that computers are mirrors of human behavior.

There is a persistent desire in business for software that solves human problems without the patience necessary to understand humans—without looking in the mirror.

Through commercially driven professional education, marketers unwittingly reinforce this desire with their breed of Magical Computer mythology. A sanitized echo chamber persists in teaching us that, with enough computer magic, the inconveniences of human complexity can be automated away.

Global Gum is my way of steering folks off this path. I want to show how we can approach workplace software with more patience, humility, humor and humanity.

Inventing The Magical Computer

Since 1968, when HAL 9000 first tried to murder his crewmates (spoiler alert) in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the “Magical Computer” has become an enduring fiction trope. This fantasy has shaped how we see computing potential. It has permeated nearly all television, film and written media, becoming the ubiquitous lens through which every increasingly digitally native generation views computer technology.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

— Arthur C. Clarke

This quote, known as Clarke’s Third Law, is how media has trained us to view software.

It also undoubtedly influenced Silicon Valley’s (and my own) favorite futurist inventor, Ray Kurzweil, who is famous for his vision of the singularity—the ultimate expression of Magical Computing—and is often seen as a prophet in the tech world.

The singularity is a prophecy that silently governs all tech startup mission statements – a promise to change the world.

But like most modern guru success stories, I’ve learned that Kurzweil’s most outstanding talent is really in marketing and selling himself. His predictions are, more often than not, flops and debunked.

Thus, I’ve come to accept that the singularity is sadly just a creative exercise in pseudo-science yet again crafted from Clarke’s Third Law.

However, Kurzweil’s success with Magical Computer utopianism endures and thrives. It continues to serve as an influential blueprint for high-tech marketers in equating their products to magic.

Magical Computers Will be Held Accountable for Your Mistakes

Through decades of media depictions and marketing spin, futurists have pushed magical thinking to influence every consumer.

This pseudo-science persists amongst otherwise smart people because it offers a seductive promise: that technology can solve human problems without requiring us to understand them.

The Magical Computer absolves the user of accountability for their impatience, flaws and mistakes. It takes the easy route. And it remains the core, unconscious foundation of most business software marketing.

Each new piece of software promises to solve your business situation as if by magic. It has done all the thinking for you. It will make your life easier and get things done faster.

This marketing message is a hit because it reflects what everyone wants! I certainly love the idea of magical software that will do more for me. And when it fails, I can shake my fist and tell my boss that the software doesn’t work right. It is, after all, supposed to be magic.

Educated Through Advertising

Over the last 20 years, I have worked in the orbit of a booming cottage industry of technology copywriting and media production professionals who work diligently to produce educational content.

Unsurprisingly, most business-focused writing about work software is thick with commercially driven motives. And each tutorial guide, white paper, or webinar subtly reflects and amplifies our desire for magical solutions.

Even the most educational content about software usually omits many inconvenient details. The worst offense, in my opinion, is that it lacks any reflection on the human behavioral skills or workplace context necessary to operate the software correctly.

These seemingly authentic educational posts are always a thinly veiled shill for the software company that created them.

Most of us are satisfied with this, but we may be missing something from this narrow frame. Our workplace skills are learned within a sanitized environment that omits the context of the workplace in which they will be used.

It’s an education through advertising that subconsciously promotes magic.

Software is a Mirror (and Not a Magic One)

Those of us who have worked at the engineering level understand how frustrating this magical thinking can be when adopted blindly by stakeholders and marketers. It promotes laziness and impatience, which results in a prolific problem of rushed or poorly planned implementations.

There are too many variables in human behavior to make a product magically perfect. Yet the laws of software marketing persist. If a product isn’t sold as magic, nobody will buy it.

The reality beneath all this magical thinking is simple: software is just a mirror reflecting human nature back at us. It is a tool created by humans to do human things, to mirror human activity and nothing more. What we call software problems are, at their core, people problems.

Yet I’m consistently amazed by how few business leaders grasp this fundamental truth. They look into the mirror of their software tools, even when they fail, and hastily twist themselves around to see an illusion instead of seeing themselves.

AI: The Ultimate Behavioral Mirror

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) represent the latest and most sophisticated versions of our magical mirror. These tools step into territory that increasingly seems to validate Clarke’s vision—technology that truly appears indistinguishable from magic.

I love the current generation of AI. Despite all the skepticism, I have fallen head over heels for it. I love it for what it is—not magic, but a tool that simulates people, a mirror that reflects human nature with unprecedented clarity.

I’m also fascinated with AI’s mistakes when they occur – because they so closely mirror our own.

Humans “Hallucinate” Too

Consider a common situation I’ve encountered as a software development manager working with offshore remote teams:

A communication void will emerge if you give a remote software developer a vague, poorly documented specification.

Let’s say we task this programmer to build a feature in a business domain they’ve never encountered. This coder is thousands of miles, many time zones and several cultures away.

Under the relentless pressure of workplace deadlines, the engineer may be unable to clarify their task for the whole business context before it is due. So, they fill this void by inventing what they believe the user should do. Their creation draws from personal influences, biases, local cultural norms, and specific worldviews.

The resulting software reflects the engineer’s imagination—and they get it wrong.

Anyone who works in remote teams knows how common this scenario is. Spurred by an unintentional specification black box and best intentions, this creativity can sometimes cost teams months, years, thousands, or even millions of dollars.

Now, we see the same pattern with LLMs—AI that is trained on massive amounts of human writing to emulate human thought patterns. When we don’t give an LLM enough context, it “hallucinates” responses based on available training data.

The mirror is here. When humans lack context, we also fill in the gaps with our own assumptions.

It’s an interesting double standard: while a mistake made by a Magical Computer is treated as a forgivable “hallucination” and considered a bug, the same mistake, if made by a human, leads to a write-up and can result in termination.

The software “bug” will be fixed, but human behavior will not. But isn’t this software designed to emulate humans? The truth is that hallucinations are not a bug.

This should humble us. For everyone seeking to absolve themselves of accountability with their Magical Computer, AI has raised the stakes by showing us our reflection more clearly than ever.

Breaking the Spell

Software products and projects fail because humans fail, and humans are flawed. This will never change; all software is simply a reflection of people. It is a tool that shows us what we want to see and responds with things we want to believe because we built it that way.

Even as software evolves to a level of complexity that appears truly indistinguishable from magic, it remains a mirror of human nature. We humans are the reference framework and the architects of all software. Computers evolve for us and with us. Your coder is not a wizard, and your AI is not a wizard, either.

After twenty years of building software, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: we blame the users when projects fail; we blame the model when the LLM hallucinates; we blame the API when integrations break. Everything but the underlying truth—that we’re asking technology to solve problems we haven’t fully understood as humans.

The Global Gum Mission

Global Gum exists because everything changes when we understand software as a mirror rather than magic. Mastering technology is not about strangling our wizards until they chant the right spell but about having the patience to understand each other.

I won’t hesitate to use AI and other emerging tools. AI’s ability to emulate human behavior helps reveal things in the mirror that we have trouble seeing on our own.

The world doesn’t need another shill that sanitizes down our digital work life so that it conforms to the fallacies of Magical Computer thinking.

Instead, Global Gum aims to spark meaningful conversations about how software reflects our daily work lives, relationships, and overall human experience in the professional world.

Because to make software work at its best, we need to look closer at ourselves.