The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy isn't just a humorous sci-fi novel, it's a roadmap to the future and has been my go-to book for 30+ years. The entire serie

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy isn't just a humorous sci-fi novel, it's a roadmap to the future and has been my go-to book for 30+ years. The entire series is a gold mine of predictions, analysis, and commentary about every facet of society from tech to religion, quantum physics to philosophy, genetics, mathematics, politics, space travel, and the very nature of reality and our place in it. It uses a core plot device where the more improbable something is, the more likely it is to happen, as a writer's ultimate Deus ex machina which springboards the reader into a thousand different ideas. I've been reading it and listening to Adam's personal narration of it for years and I still discover gems of insight I had missed. Sadly, like all authors who write about the future, as what they describe becomes reality, later readers start to dismiss their work - think Jules Verne as an example. So now the idea of a portable handheld device containing all the information you can imagine connected via invisible communications system doesn't seem as amazing as it did in the 80s and 90s. But now that we're entering the age of Artificial Intelligence, Adams insights are yet again showing his astounding prescience. Every time Alexa responds to me with some overlong response spoken in some pseudo-hip manner, I can't help but think of Adam's Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Genuine People Personality™. Just in the last several weeks alone, as the various AI image and text services have gained popularity and people started exchanging elaborate prompts which produce the best results, I've been amazed at how much they resemble Arthur trying to describe to the Nutri-Matic Drinks Dispenser exactly how to make a cup of tea. > “No,” Arthur said, “look, it’s very, very simple…. All I want… is a cup of tea. You are going to make one for me. Now keep quiet and listen.” > And he sat. He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting the milk in before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the East India Trading Company. > “So that’s it, is it?” said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished. > “Yes,” said Arthur. “That is what I want.” > “You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?” > “Er, yes. With milk.” Think of the detailed prompts given to GPT-3, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to help guide it to create the right output. If you're not amazed at a book written in the late 1970s predicting with such clarity our interaction with artificial intelligence decades later, then I can't convince you. Adams was truly a prophet. Also, of course, his humor and mastery of English turns of phrase makes it all the more better.