Adams' thoughts on computers and technology are gold. He was also the first person in the UK to buy an Apple Mac, Stephen Fry being a close second.
"I didn't really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."
"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realised it's a brochure."
"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about."
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
"I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."
“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea
into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?”
> "I didn't really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."
LOOOOOOL! My high school CS teacher, in 1982, was warning the class about the Year 2000 problem even then. The school had a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E 7.0, quite the setup for its day.
Back about 2005, when I discovered SIMH, I set up a RSTS/E 7.0 system to revisit old times. I broke out laughing when I found out that 7.0 was not at all Y2K-compliant! It wouldn't even boot if I tried to set the year to 05.
>2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
What's scary is my mind continues to change the word "career" to "cancer" here, and it seems equally true
"Technology," Adams once said, "is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet."
This could not be more true. When was the last time you referred to a teapot or a bicycle as "technology"? Even Google wouldn't be called "technology" anymore by most people who use it -- it's just Google, and it just works.
Adams didn't say that. He was quoting computer scientist Bran Ferren in his (Adams's) article in The Sunday Times "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet". It's reproduced on his personal website here: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
The actual quote is slightly different: "Technology [...] is stuff that doesn't work yet."
I hear people talk about bicycle technology all the time. E-bikes are very popular these days.
And I heard someone talking about teapot technology just last week, but he was (a) British and (b) a master electrician, so he had especially strong feelings on the matter. :-)
I don't often hear technology used as a noun (except in sci-fi stories, where it's a MacGuffin). It's an adjective: the level of technology of an item. This e-bike has improved technology compared to last year's model.
This is the same way we used it when I was studying archaeology in school. What's the level of pottery technology of this civilization? The pots clearly worked, just like a rotary-dial phone worked. They just weren't as advanced as others.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars, and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
Unpopular opinion: I haven't been able to get into the whole hype about this book.
This quote is perfect example of my frustration actually. Maybe I am OCD or something, I dont know. I do not see the humor or anything profound with it. Except it sounds a bit quirky.
Is it suppose to profoundly compare pure happiness versus struggle for progress?
...or take the whole babel fish thing; Why a fish for translation?
ps: I dont mean to target your favorite quote. It was just perfect example :D Sorry to take out my frustration on your comment.
I don't remember specifically what I was doing, but it was just a few days ago that something prompted me to recall these passages, describing the products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation:
"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
"In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
The internet is a kind of Babel fish, letting people from different cultures easily interact. Douglas' comment on the outcome seems sadly prescient:
"Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
That's absurd. There have been fewer wars and conflicts and violence in the age of the internet than at any other time. It's possible the internet makes information of such tragedies more readily accessible which is why the world may seem more dangerous, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The interconnected world has made us less bloody, not more.[1]
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?”
As Adams noted: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
Bob the Hacker was running artificial life simulation where the physics was classical Newtonian, space Euclidean and only the surface of the Earth was accurately simulated. When humanity developed better instruments and theories, Bob had to limit the maximum achievable speed so he invented general and special relativity. The she invented quantum mechanics to smooth over aliasing, jitter and other simulation artifacts that humans would eventually recognize.
Unless he keeps tweaking the simulation humanity will eventually realize that the Universe is a kludge.
In "Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency", Douglas Adam describes a camcorder as a device for watching all the television that humans don't have time to watch.
>The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
I've always preferred Dirk Gently to Hitchhiker's, likely because it speaks to me more personally as a programmer.
> "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is
> to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own
> mind ... By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that
> even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about
> it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"
> "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere
> on the table, "without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy."
Adams was clearly inspired by his time working on the computer game. All of his books have an autobiographical sense to them. Hitchhiker's and Restaurant had a lot of lying in muddy fields. The books written after he was published include more eating in fancy Greek bistros.
And now we don't even need to record anything. Just putting an important documentary in my Netflix watch list immediately makes me a more accomplished person ;)
Perhaps he meant DVR. My MythTV DVR setup records stuff I think I want to watch, then a few weeks later, it deletes most of the shows to make space for more stuff I may never watch.
Yes, I always wanted the spreadsheet called Anthem, that could make pretty charts sing. It seems charting is spreadsheets is getting worse and worse instead.
I first read these books in high school and loved the zany humor. The deeper satire took a bit longer for me to appreciate - especially the "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" where all the rich and famous would gather to watch the Universe implode as a form of entertainment. DA was a secular prophet.
Elon Musk is also a huge fan of Douglas Adams, as he mentioned again in his latest interview with Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg
I'm a little late to this thread, but given Adams is my favorite author and one who I've thought quite a lot about over the past 40 years, here's some observations:
The core theme to all his books is infinity. Adams instinctively understood what an infinite universe would mean, and used it liberally as a plot device that incorporated deus-ex-machina into the story itself. The original H2G2 story explored the fact that probabilities mean nothing when infinity comes into play, and his last examined an infinite multiverse in which "luck" is taken to its logical extreme, where changing the future means manipulating the various divergent paths of the past so that just the right thing happens at the right time and place in the present.
His talent was in following ideas to their absurd conclusions. The original series was supposed to be a bunch of different vignettes in which the Earth was destroyed at the end of each. But after writing the first, he thought, "What comes next?", and continued to flesh out the rest of story. This is a fundamental Adams hallmark, and the part of his writing I love most.
Douglas was incredibly prescient, but not in an Arthur C. Clarke sort of way. He was a gadget freak without doubt, but he didn't really understand technology at a deep level. What he did was to take what was already common knowledge - from quantum mechanics to evolution to computers - and extrapolated their concepts to their logical conclusions. If you were to have a computerized "book", then it would need to be such and such a size, and look and sound like so, and get regular updates over an pervasive wireless network, etc. It just made sense, and history has born him out. What's amazing is that he did this with a variety topics including Artificial Intelligence, and it looks like his thoughts are still incredibly applicable almost 20 years after his death.
It's sad that as times goes by, Adams work will eventually be shelved and as irrelevant as Jules Verne. Even today, the Guide is so like a modern smartphone, it doesn't feel to new readers as if there's anything novel or futuristic about it (like it was in 1978), which is too bad. But I guess that's the fate of anyone who writes stories incorporating technology.
Reagan was president. This was treated with far more incredulity at the time than the election of Trump outside the US. It was widely believed at the time across the political spectrum that Regan was a teleprompt reading puppet. Was he? Different question. Tory voters and labour-ites in the uk basically believed it with complete astonishment.
The galactic president is just a decoy, the real man is elsewhere worried about his cats. This is part of the story and characterisation that needs to be put into that context. Zaphod had no policies at all. Hardly a populist bogeyman.
I think that the main inspiration for the political part of Beeblebrox's story was probably 1976 Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" because Adams was heavy Doctor Who fan who made other borrowings from the show (for example using towels as tools was inspired by Forth Doctor's scarf usage) and soon later wrote a few episodes for it and became a showrunner.
[+] [-] mattkevan|6 years ago|reply
"I didn't really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."
"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realised it's a brochure."
"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about."
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
"I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."
[+] [-] woopwoop|6 years ago|reply
“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?”
[+] [-] flyinghamster|6 years ago|reply
LOOOOOOL! My high school CS teacher, in 1982, was warning the class about the Year 2000 problem even then. The school had a PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E 7.0, quite the setup for its day.
Back about 2005, when I discovered SIMH, I set up a RSTS/E 7.0 system to revisit old times. I broke out laughing when I found out that 7.0 was not at all Y2K-compliant! It wouldn't even boot if I tried to set the year to 05.
[+] [-] throwaway_law|6 years ago|reply
What's scary is my mind continues to change the word "career" to "cancer" here, and it seems equally true
[+] [-] bmmayer1|6 years ago|reply
This could not be more true. When was the last time you referred to a teapot or a bicycle as "technology"? Even Google wouldn't be called "technology" anymore by most people who use it -- it's just Google, and it just works.
[+] [-] DonaldPShimoda|6 years ago|reply
Adams didn't say that. He was quoting computer scientist Bran Ferren in his (Adams's) article in The Sunday Times "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet". It's reproduced on his personal website here: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
The actual quote is slightly different: "Technology [...] is stuff that doesn't work yet."
[+] [-] chunkyslink|6 years ago|reply
Salmon of Doubt
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
And I heard someone talking about teapot technology just last week, but he was (a) British and (b) a master electrician, so he had especially strong feelings on the matter. :-)
I don't often hear technology used as a noun (except in sci-fi stories, where it's a MacGuffin). It's an adjective: the level of technology of an item. This e-bike has improved technology compared to last year's model.
This is the same way we used it when I was studying archaeology in school. What's the level of pottery technology of this civilization? The pots clearly worked, just like a rotary-dial phone worked. They just weren't as advanced as others.
[+] [-] acheron|6 years ago|reply
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars, and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
[+] [-] mclightning|6 years ago|reply
This quote is perfect example of my frustration actually. Maybe I am OCD or something, I dont know. I do not see the humor or anything profound with it. Except it sounds a bit quirky.
Is it suppose to profoundly compare pure happiness versus struggle for progress?
...or take the whole babel fish thing; Why a fish for translation?
ps: I dont mean to target your favorite quote. It was just perfect example :D Sorry to take out my frustration on your comment.
[+] [-] radiowave|6 years ago|reply
"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
"In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
[+] [-] bitmage|6 years ago|reply
"Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
[+] [-] bmmayer1|6 years ago|reply
[1]https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-s...
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frood42|6 years ago|reply
Retribution: I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother.
Anticipation: I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother.
Diplomacy: I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.”
[+] [-] sebastianconcpt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HONEST_ANNIE|6 years ago|reply
Bob the Hacker was running artificial life simulation where the physics was classical Newtonian, space Euclidean and only the surface of the Earth was accurately simulated. When humanity developed better instruments and theories, Bob had to limit the maximum achievable speed so he invented general and special relativity. The she invented quantum mechanics to smooth over aliasing, jitter and other simulation artifacts that humans would eventually recognize.
Unless he keeps tweaking the simulation humanity will eventually realize that the Universe is a kludge.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
>The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
[+] [-] whoopdedo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcor84|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hathawsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willvarfar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanGPhoton|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bananicorn|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc
[+] [-] Tepix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russellbeattie|6 years ago|reply
The core theme to all his books is infinity. Adams instinctively understood what an infinite universe would mean, and used it liberally as a plot device that incorporated deus-ex-machina into the story itself. The original H2G2 story explored the fact that probabilities mean nothing when infinity comes into play, and his last examined an infinite multiverse in which "luck" is taken to its logical extreme, where changing the future means manipulating the various divergent paths of the past so that just the right thing happens at the right time and place in the present.
His talent was in following ideas to their absurd conclusions. The original series was supposed to be a bunch of different vignettes in which the Earth was destroyed at the end of each. But after writing the first, he thought, "What comes next?", and continued to flesh out the rest of story. This is a fundamental Adams hallmark, and the part of his writing I love most.
Douglas was incredibly prescient, but not in an Arthur C. Clarke sort of way. He was a gadget freak without doubt, but he didn't really understand technology at a deep level. What he did was to take what was already common knowledge - from quantum mechanics to evolution to computers - and extrapolated their concepts to their logical conclusions. If you were to have a computerized "book", then it would need to be such and such a size, and look and sound like so, and get regular updates over an pervasive wireless network, etc. It just made sense, and history has born him out. What's amazing is that he did this with a variety topics including Artificial Intelligence, and it looks like his thoughts are still incredibly applicable almost 20 years after his death.
It's sad that as times goes by, Adams work will eventually be shelved and as irrelevant as Jules Verne. Even today, the Guide is so like a modern smartphone, it doesn't feel to new readers as if there's anything novel or futuristic about it (like it was in 1978), which is too bad. But I guess that's the fate of anyone who writes stories incorporating technology.
[+] [-] severine|6 years ago|reply
https://archive.org/details/1.TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy...
[+] [-] rizwank|6 years ago|reply
“Good Omens” is the closest I’ve found.
[+] [-] bcbrown|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc
[+] [-] butterfi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osullivj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moosterv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abledon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Troyboy|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] radicalbyte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harry8|6 years ago|reply
The galactic president is just a decoy, the real man is elsewhere worried about his cats. This is part of the story and characterisation that needs to be put into that context. Zaphod had no policies at all. Hardly a populist bogeyman.
[+] [-] anonymfus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarrel|6 years ago|reply