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His genius laid in not only seeing which technologies were coming, but predicting what perversions business people would twist it into.

namaria 3y ago
Creating a computer to find "the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything", getting a cryptic answer and then creating an even bigger and more complicated computer to find the question is a pretty good satire of generative ai based chatbots of exponentially increasing model size.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  Even down to the blind faith that there was an accurate calculation performed, which ultimately justified the planet-computer.
- Deestan 3y ago
  Don't remember if it made it into the book, but from the radio series my favorite is the scene where they end up in a nightclub filled with dancing mannequins sprayed with sweat in order to convince people it was popular and come in.
  - namaria 3y ago
    > a nightclub filled with dancing mannequins sprayed with sweat That's pretty much how I see every nightclub, to be fair... I loved illegal raves when I was in college. Paying big bucks to listen to loops triggered by some influencer feels like a surreal parody...
hoc 3y ago
Well, I am intrigued by the obvious analogies of Deep Thought and the prompt engineers (and their upcoming tools and their respective complexities) while on the other hand I already see the upcoming war between simple and dumb business interests on both sides that will try to make the fascinating und useful concept (which it is after all) consumable on one side while the other side will be ready to kill it if they don't get paid for it using/refrencing/quoting their pieces of work in its answers or "thinking"/modelling. Probably resulting in a cripled tool if politics won't visibly value educational gain over commercial interest. Pain and joke too often come as closely bundled as within Adams's pointed work.

namaria 3y ago

Creating a computer to find "the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything", getting a cryptic answer and then creating an even bigger and more complicated computer to find the question is a pretty good satire of generative ai based chatbots of exponentially increasing model size.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Even down to the blind faith that there was an accurate calculation performed, which ultimately justified the planet-computer.
Deestan 3y ago
Don't remember if it made it into the book, but from the radio series my favorite is the scene where they end up in a nightclub filled with dancing mannequins sprayed with sweat in order to convince people it was popular and come in.
- namaria 3y ago
  > a nightclub filled with dancing mannequins sprayed with sweat That's pretty much how I see every nightclub, to be fair... I loved illegal raves when I was in college. Paying big bucks to listen to loops triggered by some influencer feels like a surreal parody...

hoc 3y ago

Well, I am intrigued by the obvious analogies of Deep Thought and the prompt engineers (and their upcoming tools and their respective complexities) while on the other hand I already see the upcoming war between simple and dumb business interests on both sides that will try to make the fascinating und useful concept (which it is after all) consumable on one side while the other side will be ready to kill it if they don't get paid for it using/refrencing/quoting their pieces of work in its answers or "thinking"/modelling. Probably resulting in a cripled tool if politics won't visibly value educational gain over commercial interest. Pain and joke too often come as closely bundled as within Adams's pointed work.