Clarke isn't merely saying that future gadgets will seem wondrous to us—he's identifying a *epistemological problem*: our inability to distinguish between what we understand and what we simply experience. When your grandmother watches you unlock your phone with your face, she's not wrong to feel it's magical; the gap between her knowledge and the technology's actual mechanics is precisely the gap between magic and science. What makes this penetrating is that it cuts both ways—it suggests that what we call "magic" in stories might simply be knowledge we haven't yet grasped, making the quote less about technology's trajectory and more about the poverty of human comprehension at any given moment.