Would magic limit technological progress...

It would supplement it. provided it is a reliably repeated phenomena.

The problem with this question pertains to how the magic works.

I assume you mean D&D magic where you have spells that auto do everything for seemingly no cost at all

I think magic would Accelerate technological progress. Nobody tried as hard to become a wizard.

>implying wizards wouldn't be the ones who invent guns to shoot spells with bullets.

>Would magic limit technological progress?
Depends
If magic is well spreaded and does whateevr is needed, why would you need advanced technology?
Why invent the light bulb when you have light speel?
Why invent the combustion motor when you have the weatherlight and shit?
Why invent blackpowder when you have explosive runes?

Technological advancement comes from necessity, if you don't have necessity (because magic is providing what you need) why advance technologically?

Just imagine what magic could do with modern tech.

You can't carry a spellcaster

Spellcasters shouldn't be on the field. They should be on the back. Crafting weapons of wonder for your troops. Predicting or controlling the weather. Offering intelligence etc.

Magic causes instability causes wars causes fewer peaceful stretches in which people get to do more efficient agriculture causes less people to specialize in other trades causes technological stagnation.

What do you think "technological progress" even is?

People have problems, such as 'I want to be about to send messages more quickly' or 'I don't want to spend most of my life farming' and make tools to help solve these problems. A setting with magic wouldn't slow this in any way, but instead make it faster.

Magic essentially is a whole new set of tools to work with and make better tools.

Developing magic would be technological progress. You can't just make an arbitrary distinction between magic and technology.

A healthy desire for arbitrarily more capital, earned by mobilizing all possible vectors for improvement of efficiency and efficacy at your job. If you gave a farmer a plough and then gave him an ox, he wouldn't ask "Why do I need an ox when I already have a plough?"

Cannons being imrpoved to the point they were useful in field battles had everything to do with a visionary general quest for a wonder weapon.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Žižka

The wiki does not detail that area of Jan Zizka life, but he is the person that pushed foreword field artillery cannons and go the funding together to make it happen. That funding btw was huge and throw at the best group of gun smiths in Europe at the time. The next guy to do the same...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror

... which you guessed it was a visionary general who throw a shit ton of money & skilled human capital to make it happen. After that other people invested in cannon development because it was proven way to improve one's military.

Jan Zizka took European cannon design from being behind the Chinese to more advanced then what the Chinese had for the next century till they started to copy Portuguese breech lock cannons.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breech-loading_swivel_gun

The point that I making is not that chinese are dum or European are better at engineering. Rather it is that technology moved forwords at a slow pace IRL till people with large amounts of resources felt the need to improve on a given area of technology and had target goals for said technology.

it depends

is the magic widely usable?
if it is then yes magic would probably inhibit technological progress since people would be invested into researching magic instead and you would then have magical progress, this is also assuming that people are capable of learning and creating new spells that are not in the game rules.
if it isn't widely accessible then probably not the common man needs some way to accomplish tasks and if he can't use magic to do that then he will resort to technology

that said the two systems aren't antagonists both can advance at the same time its just a matter of thinking about how they would work togeather
the gun might not have been invented of magic was widely used and instead could have been replaced by some kind of magic funnel to make spells more accurate or methods of mass producing wands and such for self defense

just think about how magic works in your setting and then try to logically step through what people would use it for and how technology would benefit them if the magic works that way

Nope. How ubiquitous the magic is (low-limited to divine works or ~1 in a million humans, high-average farmers can run an entire farm just by waving their hands) would certainly effect how fast technology advances, but even if everyone can use magic to a high level some advancement of what we would recognize as mundane technology would occur thanks to hobbyists if nothing else. Slowly, but it would occur.

In strategy studies this is called a competency trap. You invent a superior technology, but don't adopt it because an existing inferior tech has been so far refined that it's better than the superior texh in it's infancy, and you lack the funds or interest to advance it far enough that it's inherent superiority can emerge.

This happens all the time. A magical society would invest its time and best minds in magic. Science would lag, and industrialization would probably never happen.

Depends on how magic is handled in setting.
If it is a case of "Literally anyone with the right training can learn magic and there are no downsides" D&D style, then you have little reason for magic to not develop alongside agriculture until society gets to the point that you can have teachers teaching loads of kids basic farming/handiwork cantrips.

If it's more Warhammer Fantasy style of anyone can learn magic but it takes a strong will and a practiced hand to not fall to chaos doing it, you wouldn't see tech impeded, in fact you'd probably see an arms race as people try banking on wizardry or tech.

If it's a case of "you must be a chosen one" type shit, then who the fuck cares?

is this loss

I think magic would most certainly slow down the progress of technology as more people would be caring about magic than science.

Why work on guns when you can just use a fireball?

Why would magic not be considered a type of technology?

There's no reason to think that magic and technology would be separated.

>Why improve agriculture and develop siege weapons when there are druids and warmages?
Because druids and warmages are more rare, and magic isn't just a big, intangible, invisible machine that you put wishes and desires into and get results out of. Some settings think magic is exactly that. Those settings are retarded.

>that is of course not technology.
Technically, it is. Technology is just whatever means are usable to produce goods or services, which includes education.

I don't think it should or necessarily would, but technological progress has been limited by religion, philosophy, law, the local economy, war with other societies, and peaceful trade with other societies
I mean look at Japan, they stagnated for hundreds of years and lost the ability to make firearms because of political and social shit
Australia's a good one too, there were some smart cookies in (parts of) the South China Sea a long time ago, but their technologies and religions never spread as far as Australia or New Zealand or Fiji or even inland New Guinea, this time because of geography and lack of sailing technology and just sheer distance

OK autism but most of us mean some machine gadget like a computer or a money clip. Technically education is a technology but then magic would be a technology too which would make the thread topic nonsense.

meant to say, technological progress has been limited by a lack of war or trade with other societies, although the presence of those can also slow things
the point being that magic is an X factor, it could have a lot of effects, and those effects could have further effects
the big thing that comes to mind is: would a religion based around magic even allow its followers to build mechanically complicated things? dark-ages Christianity did that without even as much reason behind it, surely a religion could form around a deity of magic that states that squandering or ignoring the gift of magic is a grave sin

The thread topic is nonsense. It should be asking what tech could be designed to use magic, because there's no reason we wouldn't be trying to improve it like we do with everything else.

>Would magic limit technological progress?
Nope. If anything, it'd speed up technological development.

Most of our technology revolves around "Use [thing] to generate [power] to do [task]. Whether we're using water to turn turbines to generate electricity, or we're using electricity to power our blenders so we have smoothies, or using gasoline to run engines so we can drive to the store, we're constantly trying to find ways of generating power to suit relevant tasks. Magic would just be another facet of the energy race.

we might see certain simplifications in our technology - instead of burning gas to turn over the engine, you simply pop a spell which kicks things over but it doesn't invalidate it.

>magical crystal which converts arcane energy to electricity to power walkman
.... or you could just use a battery. does the same thing, and it's not dependent upon anything as abstract or arbitrary as magic, and you don't need a wizard.
>magic to make the car move
unless your resident wizard is sick, dead, or you can't afford it, in which case gas is far more economically feasible.
If we synonimize "magic" with "energy", and there are no requirements to use it, then it's functionally no different from electricity, gasoline, nuclear power, whatever.

But if "magic" isn't synonymous with "energy", then it's dependent upon casters. There's a human limitation that introduces a whole new element of unpredictability.

>your computer works off magical power that was cast by Sir Wizard Joe.
>Your computer starts misbehaving.
>You take it into the shop.
>they've got no fucking clue what Sir Wizard Joe did because they can't recognize his spell
>It's not like their spell at all
>tell you to talk to Joe
>joe died in a car accident
>whoops!

so on and so forth

I think, if anything, it would accelerate technological growth. Provided magic isn't completely all-encompassingly OP, theres a lot of cool applications for it where it would enhance technological capacity by allowing you to cut corners that might advance the craft many hundreds of times faster than we saw in our world.

My headcanon to justify medieval stasis with magic is that magic is inherently elitist, which impedes mass technology adoption.

While there's plenty reason for technology, the long term benefits are never obvious at first. It's the emperor of China has everything he needs in his own kingdom effect. Local aristocracy have privileged access to court mages, and they're the ones that would fund nascent technological innovation like a printing press.

Mages from an economic view might be seen as walking anti-competitive monopolistic super corporations. Massively beneficial for a small few, but on the macro scale inefficient for the general populace.

Advanced and widespread functional magic would probably merge into technological progress and redirect it rather than limit or slow it.
I remember a joke about elve of the fourth epoch sitting in a trench, and one of them goes: "Orcs are near". The other: "What? How do you know?" - "My chaingun glows".

Objectively, yes. Ancient Greece had little technological progress compared to the Renaissance/modern day because there was no need to build expensive machines when slaves could perform complex tasks for cheap. Technology develops from the need and desire to make life easier, and if there's already a sufficient method for getting something done people will generally be too lazy to make any serious progress.

I know it's not what all you "EVERY SETTING SHOULD HAVE GUNPOWDER" types want to hear, but historically speaking it's the truth.

Magic is technology.

It’s like a world without electricity (lets say run on steam instead) asking if a world with electricity would advance its tech any slower.

I think you guys are forgetting water and windmills. A watermill-powered lumber mill would be cheaper than a wizard for the output.

Same for cloth manufacturies with powered looms. Or ropewalks.

IIRC some of the earliest industrial steam engines were used to pump water out of mines. Would a mage really be willing to sit there and pump water out of a mine all day?

>Implying you wouldn't combine technology and magic for maximum progression

Guns are pretty good, right? What about guns where you can modify the payload by inscribing the right runes on it? Maybe set them on fire or make the bullet accelerate even faster? Or perhaps making it so the bullet suddenly gains extra density on impact? The possibilities would be limitless.

It depends.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)

Magic is a high-investment process that high levels are generally limited to a few.

New uses for magic are a technology, aren't they?

Oh, also forgot a more relevant thing from Turtledove, the Darkness series. WWII with industrial magic.

two really awesome examples of worlds where technology advances with magic are...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules:_The_Legendary_Journeys

and
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender
>ignore korra

You combine magic and tech, and or use them to cover the weaknesses of each other. Theres no reason people wouldn't make use of both.

magic, if wide spread enough, would encourage technology as a stalemate breaker or to overcome the normal imbalances that develop between nations. better armor, better weapons and better industry are always looked for to tip the balance in your favor.

Technomagic would likely be a thing.

And not everyone knows magic.

Well, we started building rockets for military purposes, now we use them to send people into space, war is built on technological advancement.

It depends on what kind of magic. Magic does as much and as little as the author allows, and its effects can be anything.

>ignore korra
Why? The technological advancement of the setting was the one thing about that fanfiction that actually made sense, retarded mechs notwithstanding.

kind of depends on the limits of magic and how 'accessible' certain spells are. This is a situation in my head I called 'The Cart Engineer's problem'.

Basically it goes:
>A man with a cart comes to his local wizard and asks for help to make his cart not break down so much
>The wizard accepts this and makes the wheels unbreakable by normal wear and tear, but soon, the difference in strength between wheel and axle leads to the axle snapping
>So the Wizard then makes the axle and cart similarly unbreakable. Well good and all, but now the cart is completely absorbing the vibrations and rattles of riding over rough ground and cobblestone streets, and the goods inside keep getting jostled and shaken violently within.
>Finally, the wizard just makes the cart levitate and removes the wheels entirely.
>Except inertia means it's much harder to stop now without dropping it to the ground.

All this while when the cart owner or Wizard could have asked an engineer to give the cart a suspension system.

This is not a perfect analogy really, but in my head it's one that comes to mind when one without engineering or is used to just waving problems away might not realize what the best solution to an issue is.

another thing to note: some people have considered that magic would impede firearms.

The thing magic often requires time to train and get proficient, and even then, several novice spells lack the range of a firearm.

And why did we start to get things like firearms fielded? they were easier to use.

It might take years to train a mage, it might be faster than a longbow, but it's still longer than a few weeks with a gun.

Not everything is loss, user.

It depends on the author. If he's an old-fashioned grognard or autist who's spent too much time around old-fashioned grognards, then yes.

If not, then no, probably not. You see, magic needs to be at least somewhat replicable to make for any real kind of wizard. There needs to be some combination of hand guestures and murmuring to successfully make fire appear X% of the time, at least to the degree that one can say they have some kind of control on it. And once such control is established, it basically becomes another kind of science.

What magic would do is throw the whole tech tree we're used to completely out of whack. When you've already got wizards flying around shooting thunderbolts out their arses, there's not much call for expensive biplanes or powered flight. But there will be call for specialized faraday-cage armor that will make a normal, "cheap" soldier capable of tanking lightning without pause.

I imagine a big industry would be training mages. They'd quickly become a incredibly important pillar of any society they have contact with, simply because the side that can fart fireballs is a lot better equipped to beat up the other guy and take his shit.

>Would magic limit technological progress?

It would and it wouldn't.
Without getting into "my setting" or "depends on this", wizardry and magic needs at least a few things -generally speaking- to function: it needs magic spell books, reagents, people who can read, and then to be a GOOD wizard you need to be able to focus on casting spells, reading spells, and basically doing magic without having to focus most of your energy on all this mundane prep work or for that matter having to basically start from square one every single time. I don't see many wizards becoming too good at magic if they have to fucking do everything themselves.

So even in the most basic situation Wizards and Magic 'should' create enough infastructure and educate enough smelly peasants to farm food, grow and harvest magical reagents, be able to write or at least copy texts, make paper, feed themselves, feed the wizard, etc... etc..
Like, lets do the 'caveman example' because it's the easiest to digest:
A Shaman from a primitive tribe has a number of utility based spells, mostly Druidic spells with maybe some by accidental Divine miracles: talk to animals, bless plants, predict the weather, bless hunts, and maybe a few cure wounds or even a cure disease/poison in there. As a Shaman, though, he does not come from any substantial 'written history', so his knowledge and contextual practice is limited to what his teacher taught him before him: he probably doesn't make a distinction between Divine or Arcane magic, everything is just magic, so he effectively can't specialize- there might even be a cultural stigma concerning Arcane magic that he, himself, can't overcome because he lacks offensive magic due to his way of life.

What's more, is that maybe as much as 60-70% of his knowledge and effort is going to collecting reagents and providing spiritual/magical services to his tribe so they'll keep feeding him.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to have your wizards making your weapons more powerful to outfit your rank and file soldiers, like an army with magically sharper swords or arrows that seek out enemies

Probably takes too long for too little benefit to make +1 swords for an entire army.

For one weapon a basic magical enchantment would make it indestructable by normal means (and thus not suffer from wear); it would take ages to make just one, and if you're outfitting hundreds or thousands it's just not practical.

>Would magic limit technological progress?

It MIGHT in some minor aspects but not necessarily in large scale

>Why improve agriculture and develop siege weapons when there are druids and warmages?

Any druid would ram his shillelagh down your throat if you suggested exploiting their arts for menial shit that can be achieved through a direct approach, magic is not an utility even if there are decadent fucks who insist on using it as such, regular technology is just more approachable and reliable and the same applies for war technology

This. I feel like the presence of magic would facilitiate advancement if only to make what they do easier.

Why spend hours copying tomes by hand when you can use a paper press? Why maticulously carve runes out everytime when you can make a mold that is the correct shape, depth, whatever and have it filled with whatever magical bullshit perfectly.

You need a good supply chain to keep all those magical components coming in and various buinsses practices would be invented as whole industries are made to cater to magic users.

And even all that, gunpowder is still better then sending some nerd to the front lines to cast fireball

Magic is a form of technology

Just because it's not machines and gears doesn't mean it's not a tool that people use to do more work

Read Fimbulwinter by E. William Brown.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: Yes because the desire to use magic in the place of technology would cripple development of the scientific arts. They would still exist to an extent, but what's the point when you have conjurers who can literally make anything you need out of almost anything you desire?

China also had little need to update their cannon at the time, since they were completely fit-for-purpose for their modest sieges, and when it came to the sieges of the few fortifications their cannon couldn't touch, they had the manpower and logistical advantage to just besiege.

Jan Zizka and Mehmed spent a fuckload on their cannon, but also got lucky in that they spent the money at the time that advances in metallurgy and chemistry had made significant upgrades to firing and fusing mechanisms. Many other rulers spent plenty on cannon to no effect, because there just wasn't an advance in the wings.

>And why did we start to get things like firearms fielded? they were easier to use.
Guns and bows were fielded together for a while. It wasn't until the arquebus came along that gunpowder weapons started doing away with archery. By the 16th century crossbows had disappeared from most European armies and the longbow by the late 16th century. From the writings of 16th century veterans the reason firearms went into use was because they were plain superior weapons to, say, longbows, in pretty much every scenario. Training wasn't much of a factor, especially in England where longbows were cheap and there was a pool of archers around.

Keeping in mind that the Catholic Church had banned crossbow use in war under threat of excommunication.

Mages become elitarian cast, and technology becomes some sort of class struggle.

Thats actually dependnds on nature of magic in the setting.
Its talent you born with? - Closed society of mages that somewhere between ruling class, major political power or strictly controlled by other force (like mages in dragon age).
Skill you can learn - Mages become rich elites, keeping their secrets from masses to abuse them and stay on top.
But well i just realise its no difference between tech and magic. Tech too can be talent or learning based. After all words magic and technology themself have same root - "excellence in the art".

What a ridiculous question. Magic is technology. Do you think that a scrying spell is really that different than using satellite imaging and GPS to locate someone? You can probably understand some of the process of the real life version but guess what: the wizard thinks the same thing about his spell. Both methods use reliable methods to achieve their results. The only difference is what method the universe allows.

Science actually born from rl magic. Some dude mixes mold in a jar, other stab a frog under full moon. They all think they do research on how the world works and both have respect for another. Theories of the first dude works and he become "ancient scientis" in the books, second dude forgotten. Like real works of Paracelcius and Newton are straight occultism. Stuff that worked became science, stuff that didnt became occult. For them it was the same, they didnt wake up and think "Okay today before dinner i write book about magical jumbo jambo, and after dinner some serious science"

>Would magic limit technological progress?
no

Reminder that the ancients could have had steam tech if they wanted but they felt no need to develop it as they had slaves

As now we can have robots do all the work if we want, but still you exist and do the work allready. If you agree to lower you payment you actually can never be replaced by robots.

>I know it's not what all you "EVERY SETTING SHOULD HAVE GUNPOWDER" types want to hear, but historically speaking it's the truth.

Unless theres no alchemy its still not an excuse for no gunpowder

...

Stop with that bullshit. Being aware of a concept is not 1% of being able to put it into practice.

I like this magic-enabled science element. Wizards are often coded as really weird scientists anyway, it makes sense that one would study their area of expertise in its magical and mundane qualities, and use their knowledge of each to aid their study in the other.

The thing with technological progress is that it's something that includes the entire society, it needs visionaries and money, but it also needs consumers, needs infrastructure, needs dozens of other instances of itself, each and every one of which has its own prerequisites and needs. Steam engine was born out of blind persistence of one businessman, but what enabled it was the availability of cheap high-quality steel, abundance of cheap coal that can be transported long distances for peanuts, and economic circumstances that made the large, expensive engine desirable over traditional waterwheel-driven machinery. If a wizards invents it then it's just another wizard thing.

Why could a wizard not invent things to be used by nonwizards?

sometimes wizards just combine magic and science

I see magic as kind of a mix between religion and the way Alchemy is handled in FMA.

Only devout, some what obsessed people with some innate talent or skill can do magic, and because it's so individual and those individuals tend to be rather odd it's difficult for Nations to Corral them together in order to create a standing force large enough to rule the world.

What that means is magic users innovate their world depending on their teachings.
But there aren't very many of them, and because it's challenging thing to do, there have been misshaps, causing people to distrust magic to some extent.

This thread is relevant to my interests.

I was trying to find pics or info regarding a type of magic punk style world. (Like steampunk but shit running on magikz)

Any help or ideas?