In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
#douglasadams
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"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
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.
The sign said:
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."
"You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.
The Ident-I-Eeze encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and it therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Niklas quoted The AI Con by Emily M. Bender
A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls …
At the core of Al-for-science hype is the idea that Al is somehow going to accelerate science and help us solve pressing scientific problems much faster. In 2016, Al researcher and Sony executive Hiroaki Kitano proposed a "grand challenge" of designing an Al system that could "make major scientific discoveries in biomedical sciences and that is worthy of a Nobel Prize and far beyond." In 2021, he rebranded this exercise as the Nobel Turing Challenge—a combination of Nobel ambitions and the Turing Test, which we'll discuss in the next chapter-and started a series of workshops to publicize this goal. His vision is an autonomous agent that can "do science" on its own, rapidly scaling the number of scientific discoveries available to humanity.
The absurdist writer Douglas Adams caricatured this kind of wishful thinking perfectly in the late 1970s, with the characters in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who developed a supercomputer to give them the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. That answer, they learned after generations of waiting, was 42. Of course, such an answer is useless without the corresponding question, and their supercomputer wasn't powerful enough to determine the question. It was powerful enough, however, to design an even bigger computer (the planet Earth, as it happens) that could, given 10 million years, calculate the question. We can't delegate science to machines, because science isn't a collection of answers. It's a set of processes and ways of knowing.
— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (30%)
"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."
"Come," said Slartibartfast, "you are to meet the mice."
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
📷 by Pablo Carlos Budassi
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-12 at #towelday #space #douglasadams #thehitchhikers #galaxy #universe #books
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "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."
"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."
They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.