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gotta say, douglas adams prepared me better for our absurd future than isaac asimov. like, spending hours explaining to a replicator AI how to make an excellent cup of tea, only to have the AI then lock up 100% of the ships computers resources mid-battle as it tries to comply with the request, that does seem like an increasingly more plausible scenario than a scientist planning a techno cult centuries in advance to prevent a great calamity
@lritter Plus, generative AIs deliver results which are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what you need.
@aaribaud @lritter
He predicted LLMs
"Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion."
-- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11259355-well-gordon-s-great-insight-was-to-design-a-program-which
@msbellows @bornach @aaribaud @lritter mmm, I would have said the iPad + Wikipedia, but sure
Minus the editorial process though, which he'd kept from the publishing world of the time (and was necessary in order to set up the "mostly harmless" joke anyway).
@aaribaud @msbellows @bornach @lritter Yeah that’s an angle I forgot to look at! Douglas was so close to the publishing industry that (as of the 1990s) he couldn’t foresee its demise or afterlife-transformation, in the vein of “video killed the radio star”