WithBoots lives! Ted Chiang has a post about technology, magic and consciousness you should read:
This doesn’t mean that a fantasy universe is necessarily ruled by a capricious god or gods; being a person doesn’t mean being arbitrary or inconsistent. But one consequence is that, in a fantasy universe, certain things are not susceptible to mass production. For example, you could say that, in order for your magical radio to function, you need to appease a certain deity, and so you say a prayer each time you make a radio, and your radios always work. That’s consistent with dealing with a person. But if you’ve got a machine that is stamping out functional radios by the thousands, it’s no longer reasonable to say that it’s appeasing a deity every time. Instead, it makes more sense to say you’re dealing with impersonal laws of nature; your radio is an example of applied science, not applied magic.