But we have Wizard academies and the like. We have an infrastructure in place with the explicate goal to technologize magic. And for good reason. If you are the ruler of a nation in a magic enriched world you would be out of your fucking mind not to do everything in your power to advance research into both magical theory and effective teaching methods for magical learning. By making magic a natural law of your universe (even an extremely complicated series of natural laws that not everyone could possibly understand) you have made it, if not a technology, at least technologizable. Let me put it this way, there are a great many sciences that have "intelligence" barriers in the technologization process. Nevertheless, we have bio-tech industries on a massive scale because the utility of technologizing science is such that it would be completely unthinkable not to do that. How much more so in a magic enriched world.jadagul wrote:Vebyast: except even that's wrong. You're saying that a wizard can use his human capital to produce physical capital. Which is of course true. And it's actually really cool if the capital he creates doesn't depreciate. But it's still just capital. Technology is stuff that improves productivity by being known, rather than being a physical infrastructure that exists somewhere.
Another way of looking at it is the old line that "information wants to be free." And it does; sharing information is free. In contrast, sharing a wand of "wall of stone", or a plow, is expensive; if I give you mine then I don't have one any more. Technology is "productivity-enhancing stuff that wants to be free," and capital is "productivity-enhancing stuff that doesn't want to be free." For gamist reasons, D&D has basically no technology, because they don't want your characters getting anything for free. And that makes sense. But it makes the whole setting kind of anti-technological.
If there were reason to, as a society, figure out how to effectively teach people how to ride without stirrups we would try to do that and "horse riding" would become a technology.