Tuesday, June 21, 2016

A Towel is about the Most Massively Useful Thing an Interstellar Hitchhiker Can Have

“A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” That line from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy illustrates well our perceptions of “technology.”

As author Douglas Adams, author of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,  once said, “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” said Douglas Adams,

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

For Millennials, towels are not technology. Neither are computers, the Internet or smartphones. For Boomers, all that stuff often remains “technology.”

No comments:

Generative AI Will NOT have the Impact Many Expect

Generative artificial intelligence, to say nothing of machine learning or neural networks (and eventually general AI), might collectively re...