Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams Was Right About Life, the Universe and Everything
Then there are authors whose literary arguments ran so deep they transcended ‘concept’ and moved into ‘paradigm change’ for their impact on our thinking. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is possibly the ultimate example of this where his depiction of the future was so intimidating, we immediately categorise any totalitarian governance, social manipulation and/or invasive surveillance as ‘Orwellian’. And so scary we even count how many of George’s sinister predictions have come true; the last tally I saw had us ticking off more than a hundred of the total 137.
Welcome to Our New Adamsian World
Of course, fear isn’t the only motivator for us to take a literary depiction of the future so seriously; we can be wowed with laughter, imagination and – frankly – confusion too.
Douglas Adams never tried to predict the future like most sci-fi writers; he didn’t dwell on what amazing tech we’d have in 2035. He asked much stranger questions, like what happens to us when all that amazing tech becomes part of our everyday lives? Adams explained how smartphones would make us feel rather than how they would work – and, like Orwell before him, as the years have rolled by he’s got righter and righter.
A Lonely, Ancient Year Burning in the Dark
Douglas Adams’ seminal work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was written way back in 1978. A time of disco, punk rock, the All Blacks’ first-ever Grand Slam and a Sir Richard Hadlee-inspired New Zealand side finally knocking off England at the Basin. Computers were also the size of small buildings then and a ‘mobile’ phone meant using one of those booths Superman used to get changed in.
Yet the Hitchhiker’s Guide that Adams sketched was an always-available repository of all human knowledge you could query interactively and whose entries were written, corrected and argued over by users. An unbelievably accurate depiction of sites like Wikipedia, AI chatbots and internet search engines – more than a decade before Sir Tim Berners-Lee had even proposed the World Wide Web in 1989.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Then there was Deep Thought, the massive supercomputer built by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings (a.k.a. mice) designed to deliver the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of cogitation it spat out the exact answer: 42.
I didn’t get the joke the first time around, it just seemed so silly and pointless. But the further we go down this AI world, the more sense it makes. We have all these incredibly complex and powerful intelligent systems, and we keep asking them dumb questions that solve nothing.
Similarly Marvin the Paranoid Android, though he seemed more depressed and underutilised than paranoid, griped continuously that he had a brain the size of a planet yet was employed only in opening and shutting doors. Such a familiar scenario when we use our own personal interfaces into a trillion-parameter neural network to merely juggle social club meetings or craft a ‘casual-sounding’ email to Sarah from accounts to see if she wants to grab a coffee.
2∞ to 1 and Falling
One of the most ridiculous ideas Adams had was the Infinite Improbability Drive, where a spaceship could travel across the galaxy by calculating the exact mathematical improbability of an event and forcing the universe to make it happen. Preposterous to the point of stupidity back in the 1970s but now… not quite so much. Maybe. The more we try to understand quantum mechanics, the more we learn we really don’t know what the hell is going on. So, while the chances of us ever building a ship with such an insane engine are incredibly low, as Schrödinger would put it, it is actually neither fully possible nor impossible but both at the same time – until measured.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Predictions
Like George Orwell, many of Douglas Adams’ predictions have not only come true but have become part of our everyday lives. Suburbs are routinely bulldozed to make room for new highways, computers can be programmed in everyday language now rather than code and language apps can translate in real time – the Babel fish, more or less. But even more astonishing is that the somewhat surreal, ridiculous and sarcastic tone of Adams’ books is increasingly becoming reflected in the everyday world around us. Everywhere you look is tech of jaw-dropping power being used by people who have no idea what they’re doing and bureaucratic systems functioning perfectly – yet achieving nothing. Our future doesn’t look like a sleek Jules Verne or H.G. Wells spacecraft, it looks like a handy mini-dongle that can translate a thousand languages and compute in quantum mechanics – yet simply cannot sync with the office printer.
Maybe our world is becoming both Orwellian and Adamsian at the same time – scary, totalitarian, stupid, funny and absurd all together. We’re carrying Orwell’s telescreen and Adams’ Guide in our pockets at the same time.
Don’t panic. But maybe don’t answer if it rings either.