What do tech and Houdini have in common?

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This week we’re quoting…

Mark Weiser (Chief Technologist at Xerox PARC)

What Weiser said: 

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

The escape artist 

In 1912, Harry Houdini performed one of his most famous illusions. 

Suspended upside down, locked in a glass tank filled with water, he vanished from view behind a curtain – only to reappear moments later, free.

The audience was focused on the escape. But we think the real magic was how he disappeared. 

Technology begins as a spectacle 

Important technologies often start where Houdini did – on stage (or at least, sort of). 

By that, we mean those technologies are made very visible. They’re talked about constantly, and pushed into people’s field of awareness. We measure their value by what they’re capable of doing. 

Robotics still carries this energy. But while robots still feel a bit sci-fi to lots of us, scale is already happening. According to the International Federation of Robotics, in 2024 alone 542,076 industrial robots were installed globally, bringing the total operational stock to over 4.6 million systems worldwide.

The spectacle is still there, but robotics is already moving into a new phase – increasingly embedded into industries. 

Early-stage tech draws attention to itself, even as adoption accelerates behind the scenes. 

The endgame is disappearance 

Houdini understood that the moment that stays with the audience isn’t the big reveal – it’s the vanishing.

The same thing plays out in technology.

Weiser described it decades ago, in the quote we opened this newsletter with – published in the journal Scientific American. Electricity didn’t remain a spectacle, and neither did the internet or cloud computing. Each one turned into something we relied on without thinking about it much. 

So the trajectory of great technology is from visible to invisible. 

And infrastructure is the final act 

When tech does disappear into the background, that’s because it has gained genuine importance. It has become infrastructure. 

You can see robotics doing this already if you look at more complex systems. In healthcare, for example, robotic surgery in the UK is moving towards 500,000 procedures annually within the National Health Service by 2035, shifting from specialist capability into standard care pathways.

Instead of a tool to deploy, the tech becomes a system you operate within. You assume its capabilities are there, and you depend on them. 

Houdini’s genius was in controlling attention – knowing when to be seen, and when to disappear. And today, technology follows that same arc. First capturing attention, then earning its place – before it fades into the background of our lives. 

Read more: Robotics in the real world

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Catch you next week,

The LEAP Team