He predicted stuff that stuff will predict at a later time too and stuff we have not even heard of yet. Dude.. by the way I had no Idea he was not only writing a few books. . Especially nothing about his epic insight into computer tech and it's far reaching potentials. And more.. much more. I ended up feeling this way some decades ago that mister D.N.A is my fave frood and a really amazingly hoopy hero for life, the universe and probably everything as well. Respect.
Science fiction has been saying things like that for over a hundred years. If you go to older fiction, thousands of years. Our monitors are made with little tiny crystals, thousands of years ago people looked into crystals to see faraway places... The oldest use of the term "social media" I found was in a short story about someone sending and receiving letters in 1845. Someone in 1905 referred to the Newspaper as "social media". Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia written by its users. That actually dates back to The Royal Society from the 1700's where anyone that wanted to could submit anything into the library, and read anything they wanted to from it. For that matter, Rome had a library like that where anyone could have their book copied and put in the library. I absolutely love his body of work, but don't think for a second that his conclusions, though possibly personally arrived at, were even remotely new concepts. Almost nothing is actually new. When was the first flying car? When did they invent the helicopter... His writing style seemed like a cross between A.A. Milne, Doctor Who, and George Orwell. His ideas of technology? Even the movie Tron was in production in the late 70's.
@@samuelstinson3274 Mirror mirror on the wall, who predicted them all? Have you ever heard of a magazine called Popular Science? It was originally produced in 1872 and has had every kind of technology you can imagine, usually 50 years before they existed. Did it invent these ideas? No, these concepts are usually bounced back and forth until someone figures out how to do them. Watch an episode of the Jetsons from 1962 where someone uses a camera phone to talk to someone. Or a video from Bell Labs in 1968 where someone edits a document with the use of a mouse and keyboard, decades before Windows or Mac existed. The roots of technology go way back, long before the actual machines exist. In 20 years kids are going to watch a sci-fi movie from the 90's and say "How smart, they predicted flying drone delivery so long ago." Only because they had never heard of an issue of Popular Science from 1923 where robots in the sky fly back and forth with delivers of people's shopping. I love the guy, but he is just in the middle of the world like the rest of us, he just heard of things and passed them on, the difference is we haven't heard what he did, or saw what he saw to make him come to those conclusions. Most of our new inventions were thought up in laboratories in colleges in the 1960's and 1970's and it wasn't until now that there was a market to sell them, so someone with enough money had a reason to "invent" them. Did you know there were more electric cars on the road in the 1920's than gas cars? And they even had 100 mile range. Elon Musk is a great entrepreneur but he was 100 years too late to invent the electric car.
Yes but with the exception that for any math page, you’re better off going to wolfram alpha or some place else for a definition, at least if you’re not fluent in speaking set theory and abstract algebra.
Since he presented this in 1996, it is amazing how much his cautions were accurate. Since the dependence upon virtual during COVID, we are now learning (I hope), to appreciate true face to face and the incredibly significant difference, that 'virtual' would never replace.
also he makes a good point about modelling. the problem with operating systems today is that theyre modeled to what the designers want the users to use them for. they are not giving the user the freedom to do what they want to do with them. It utterly baffles me why a modern computer with 10000 times more harddrive space, 100 times more ram, 1000 times more processing power using four times as much electricity doesnt do much more than a computer with far less resources did when Douglas Adams gave this lecture. Thats NOT progress
@@spaceloser3016 the fact that you write ‘at the moment’ is an indicator that humans can only percieve time in a linear way. Hence it might be very possible or even plausible that this message will not reach you ‘for a long time’.
@@Peacefroggthis is the best and most appropriate long term thread answer I have ever seen.🎉 And I lurk regularly. What are the odds I find this clever gem? This shall set the tone for 2024. Improbable but not impossible. Thank you internet stranger.
The great mistake that those of us who built the Internet in the 1980s and early 1990s made was that we foolishly assumed that, based upon our prior experience of communications tools, mostly everyone using the Internet would be of at least moderate intelligence. As it turns out, we were horrifically incorrect as to how the Internet would come to be used by people. As the saying goes, "half of all humanity is of below average intelligence", and it turns out that it's immensely profitable to build communications tools which exploit people's ignorance.
Yes. It’s an absurdly easy way to spread misinformation, even with the correct information practically sitting next to it, enough people still aren’t being educated on how to critically think and do their own “research” by using what is scientifically proven through non bias search terms and scholarly sources. The knowledge is out there, it’s just usually clouded over by the louder and typically less thought out opinions masquerading as facts.
Having only seen pictures of his head and shoulders on the backs of books I thought he would be short and chubby. I didn't know he was a burly man-giant.
I thought he was going to say that he could tell it is a Microsoft conference because there is a clock that tells him how long he has got left ... and every so often it stops and then the time goes up.
I've heard variations of the fighter jet story told about the F-15, F-16, F-17 and even the F-18 which, as far as I can tell, has never existed. It's one of those wonderful stories that really should be true but doesn't seem to be. I have come to this conclusion for three reasons. 1) I, and several others that I know of, some of them very well placed, have looked for any report on the subject or even a first hand account but found none. (I know: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.) 2) These systems are exhaustively tested before they're flown, and not just in virtual worlds inside of computers, but with physical simulators. These machines send the same signals to the computers as would be in flight. The big difference is that it doesn't make as much of a mess when the plane crashes. 3) The navigation system detects when you cross the equator. The flight control system can turn the plane over. These two systems are not connected. But keep telling the story, especially to people who insist on drawing conclusions based on incomplete and/or suspect data, like what you get off of the internet.
Of this particular story i am not sure, but there are similar examples. Look up what happened to a squad of brand new F22s when they crossed the international date line en-route to Japan. There you have a great example of 'exhaustive' testing. Qutie often its easy to misunderstand how apparently unconnected subsystems might interfere with each other in unexpected ways (which i think is kind of the point being made). Are you completely sure the Navigation system has no effect of the flight controls? How do the flight controls work out where they are or in what direction they are pointing? Could they perhaps be taking data from the INS gyros?
There are also examples of jets that refuse to start when pointed in certain directions and nudged slightly, because the computer system refuses to accept that you can go from a bearing of 359.999 degrees to 0 degrees in such a short space of time, and consequently shuts everything down. No one else seemed to have the problem, it was just 'lucky' that these particular operators happened to have hangars that pointed due north.
Jim Nuss coming to the end of that story one should come to understand that this is just a parable or allegory. A long fiction to express an unrelated truth.
After googling for a bit it seems that the F-16 software glitch did in fact exist but was caught in simulations and fixed before the aircraft was built. If this had happened in real life the pilot(s) would be killed by the very rapid flip.
Quite in line with we are but our active remembrance of our surroundings is at every updated time. We are what we continuously remember and regurgitate and update. Break this cycle, and it breaks your sense of self and being.
Yes, Douglas Adams was a genius. But also realise that many of these insights were around in the world of the early 90's. Everybody was thinking about where we would be taken by internet, www, and graphic user interfaces with sound and video, and various types of data and services.
Douglas Adams gets to the podium at 2:20 and takes a while to get into his stride, but from about 5:20 onwards this is worth watching and listening to. One thing : the video length is 1:19:19 but he finishes talking at 1:03:00. So he's up there talking for about 60 minutes, and I don't think he's still for any of that time. This is unusual, I don't recall seeing him do that anywhere else. Too late alas to ask him why he was doing it ...
cartons of I, for one, greatly appreciated her cutting edge powerpoint presentation on how juice boxes were consumed at the Microsoft Convention in 1996
He hasn't come forward, but that story has been repeated so often that whoever the guy was he must have heard it by now. But of course, he's the one without the punchline :)
When he discusses speciation at 49 minutes, he leaves out an extra aspect of “punctuated equilibrium.” What keeps the main population from adapting to cold? I think that is an ongoing question.
I love this man, but I feel like the very clear conceptualisation of how the human evolution (the soul) producing mental models, being such a definitive way of capitulating this idea, being so well-understood but in itself stands in the way of specific models that each human may be attempting to develop experiencially
@@UPTHETOWN evolution is a perpetual and non linear process. As our environment changes over time, our species must adapt and change to suit it or perish and leave the earth to better adapted animals. Evolution doesn't necessarily make things better, just better suited to their environments. If the environment doesn't change, competition within our species and between our species and other species will continue to drive evolution to favour some traits over others.
Goodness I wish he was still alive.
Dude.. yeah. Word.
Douglas 4tw!
42 likes it is a sign
So does he.
@@gumunduringigumundsson9344 Okay we will lose
So long and thank you for all the fish.
Adams predicted IOT, Google Earth, Social Media, and Wikipedia. Not bad for an hour’s keynote.
He predicted stuff that stuff will predict at a later time too and stuff we have not even heard of yet. Dude.. by the way I had no Idea he was not only writing a few books. . Especially nothing about his epic insight into computer tech and it's far reaching potentials. And more.. much more.
I ended up feeling this way some decades ago that mister D.N.A is my fave frood and a really amazingly hoopy hero for life, the universe and probably everything as well. Respect.
Yeah wikipedia is the guide
Science fiction has been saying things like that for over a hundred years. If you go to older fiction, thousands of years. Our monitors are made with little tiny crystals, thousands of years ago people looked into crystals to see faraway places... The oldest use of the term "social media" I found was in a short story about someone sending and receiving letters in 1845. Someone in 1905 referred to the Newspaper as "social media". Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia written by its users. That actually dates back to The Royal Society from the 1700's where anyone that wanted to could submit anything into the library, and read anything they wanted to from it. For that matter, Rome had a library like that where anyone could have their book copied and put in the library. I absolutely love his body of work, but don't think for a second that his conclusions, though possibly personally arrived at, were even remotely new concepts. Almost nothing is actually new. When was the first flying car? When did they invent the helicopter... His writing style seemed like a cross between A.A. Milne, Doctor Who, and George Orwell. His ideas of technology? Even the movie Tron was in production in the late 70's.
@@musikSkool The point is not that these things are new. The point is Adams saw them twenty years before everyone else.
@@samuelstinson3274 Mirror mirror on the wall, who predicted them all? Have you ever heard of a magazine called Popular Science? It was originally produced in 1872 and has had every kind of technology you can imagine, usually 50 years before they existed. Did it invent these ideas? No, these concepts are usually bounced back and forth until someone figures out how to do them. Watch an episode of the Jetsons from 1962 where someone uses a camera phone to talk to someone. Or a video from Bell Labs in 1968 where someone edits a document with the use of a mouse and keyboard, decades before Windows or Mac existed. The roots of technology go way back, long before the actual machines exist. In 20 years kids are going to watch a sci-fi movie from the 90's and say "How smart, they predicted flying drone delivery so long ago." Only because they had never heard of an issue of Popular Science from 1923 where robots in the sky fly back and forth with delivers of people's shopping. I love the guy, but he is just in the middle of the world like the rest of us, he just heard of things and passed them on, the difference is we haven't heard what he did, or saw what he saw to make him come to those conclusions. Most of our new inventions were thought up in laboratories in colleges in the 1960's and 1970's and it wasn't until now that there was a market to sell them, so someone with enough money had a reason to "invent" them. Did you know there were more electric cars on the road in the 1920's than gas cars? And they even had 100 mile range. Elon Musk is a great entrepreneur but he was 100 years too late to invent the electric car.
I was there. My colleague fell asleep during this, which was astonishing.
At 8am start that's really not surprising. What a time for a keynote speech.
The Guide is essentially Wikipedia on a Tablet device ... and Douglas predicted that in the late ‘70s.
and now they censor wikipedia cos people trust it and now its full of corporate rich people lies
Yes but with the exception that for any math page, you’re better off going to wolfram alpha or some place else for a definition, at least if you’re not fluent in speaking set theory and abstract algebra.
Encyclopedias existed long before either.
@@topdog5252As a physics student, I’ve never thought WA had any helpful definitions of maths concepts. Wiki all the way!
@@CharlieQuartz maybe. My dad told me it was helpful, but he’s a mathematician soo… idk.
love this guy, he put that camera crew to work :)
Since he presented this in 1996, it is amazing how much his cautions were accurate. Since the dependence upon virtual during COVID, we are now learning (I hope), to appreciate true face to face and the incredibly significant difference, that 'virtual' would never replace.
This is brilliant in so many ways and super eye opening for a software engineer.
Thank you so much for posting this, admittedly 6 years ago! I'm a huge DNA fan, and this has been an amazing video to watch.
"Don't build dead things in it [the internet]" What a piece of advice, unfortunately ignored by our current tech billionaires.
also he makes a good point about modelling. the problem with operating systems today is that theyre modeled to what the designers want the users to use them for. they are not giving the user the freedom to do what they want to do with them. It utterly baffles me why a modern computer with 10000 times more harddrive space, 100 times more ram, 1000 times more processing power using four times as much electricity doesnt do much more than a computer with far less resources did when Douglas Adams gave this lecture. Thats NOT progress
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He is my absolute favourite person. I hope to be just like him one day. I wish I could have met him.
I wish you could have met him too. He is very much like me... except I am less dead.
@@JohnLloydScharf yes, I’d hope so. Otherwise there may be some funky things happening with time at the moment.
@@spaceloser3016 the fact that you write ‘at the moment’ is an indicator that humans can only percieve time in a linear way. Hence it might be very possible or even plausible that this message will not reach you ‘for a long time’.
@@Peacefroggthis is the best and most appropriate long term thread answer I have ever seen.🎉 And I lurk regularly. What are the odds I find this clever gem?
This shall set the tone for 2024. Improbable but not impossible.
Thank you internet stranger.
In 1996!!!
If he had only seen how full of detriment and distraction the great Internet has become.
You never read HHG.I suspect nothing on the Net was not predicted by him.
still implossible to replicate a simple cup of earl grey.
25 years on and was right again and again.
Second best person who ever lived, after the one and only nr 1 Zaphod Beeblebrox of course.
The great mistake that those of us who built the Internet in the 1980s and early 1990s made was that we foolishly assumed that, based upon our prior experience of communications tools, mostly everyone using the Internet would be of at least moderate intelligence. As it turns out, we were horrifically incorrect as to how the Internet would come to be used by people. As the saying goes, "half of all humanity is of below average intelligence", and it turns out that it's immensely profitable to build communications tools which exploit people's ignorance.
Yes. It’s an absurdly easy way to spread misinformation, even with the correct information practically sitting next to it, enough people still aren’t being educated on how to critically think and do their own “research” by using what is scientifically proven through non bias search terms and scholarly sources. The knowledge is out there, it’s just usually clouded over by the louder and typically less thought out opinions masquerading as facts.
In London in 1971, I met a guy who was 6'9" . I figure there's about a 1/3,000 probability that I met Douglas Adams. .
That would be brilliant if you had.
Adams was 6’5 so probably not
My absolute hero
Very interesting perspectives. This really should have far more views!
Thank you for uploading the video
Having only seen pictures of his head and shoulders on the backs of books I thought he would be short and chubby. I didn't know he was a burly man-giant.
A Genius
He was an excellent public speaker.
This is from the book, love it!!!
Ahh! the biscuit story! My favourite
I thought he was going to say that he could tell it is a Microsoft conference because there is a clock that tells him how long he has got left ... and every so often it stops and then the time goes up.
Haha
“It is not a feature, it is bug”. Microsoft development is a single phrase.
R.I.P.
@ 1:18 wtf "Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy"?! It's "Hitchhiker's", lady. Good God, that was one hell of a sacrilegious screw up.
Thank you
They keep laughing at scientifically valid things! Bloody hell. Never trust an engineer.
I've heard variations of the fighter jet story told about the F-15, F-16, F-17 and even the F-18 which, as far as I can tell, has never existed. It's one of those wonderful stories that really should be true but doesn't seem to be. I have come to this conclusion for three reasons.
1) I, and several others that I know of, some of them very well placed, have looked for any report on the subject or even a first hand account but found none. (I know: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
2) These systems are exhaustively tested before they're flown, and not just in virtual worlds inside of computers, but with physical simulators. These machines send the same signals to the computers as would be in flight. The big difference is that it doesn't make as much of a mess when the plane crashes.
3) The navigation system detects when you cross the equator. The flight control system can turn the plane over. These two systems are not connected.
But keep telling the story, especially to people who insist on drawing conclusions based on incomplete and/or suspect data, like what you get off of the internet.
Of this particular story i am not sure, but there are similar examples. Look up what happened to a squad of brand new F22s when they crossed the international date line en-route to Japan. There you have a great example of 'exhaustive' testing. Qutie often its easy to misunderstand how apparently unconnected subsystems might interfere with each other in unexpected ways (which i think is kind of the point being made). Are you completely sure the Navigation system has no effect of the flight controls? How do the flight controls work out where they are or in what direction they are pointing? Could they perhaps be taking data from the INS gyros?
There are also examples of jets that refuse to start when pointed in certain directions and nudged slightly, because the computer system refuses to accept that you can go from a bearing of 359.999 degrees to 0 degrees in such a short space of time, and consequently shuts everything down. No one else seemed to have the problem, it was just 'lucky' that these particular operators happened to have hangars that pointed due north.
Jim Nuss coming to the end of that story one should come to understand that this is just a parable or allegory. A long fiction to express an unrelated truth.
After googling for a bit it seems that the F-16 software glitch did in fact exist but was caught in simulations and fixed before the aircraft was built. If this had happened in real life the pilot(s) would be killed by the very rapid flip.
The joy of being a fantasy sci-fi satirists 😂
A nice follow-up to this is Neil Gaiman's 2015 DNA memorial speech.
The soda machine connected to the Internet was at Carnegie-Mellon University in the 1980s.
Quite in line with we are but our active remembrance of our surroundings is at every updated time. We are what we continuously remember and regurgitate and update. Break this cycle, and it breaks your sense of self and being.
And that’s why souls aren’t things
The 80’s when we didn’t have enough cloth to make shirts so we used parachutes.
From the thumbnail I would swear it was Ed O’Neill and I wondered what the two of them were doing in the same video..
Yes, Douglas Adams was a genius. But also realise that many of these insights were around in the world of the early 90's. Everybody was thinking about where we would be taken by internet, www, and graphic user interfaces with sound and video, and various types of data and services.
Ok, but they also didn’t write the book that underpins all early nineties geek humour. You don’t know where your towel is
‘The Machine Stops’ by EM Forster has the internet, Wikipedia, voice mail, video calls, telemedicine and numerous other ideas. It was written in 1909.
Hilarious! The cookie story wasn't fiction but really happened to him like it happened to Arthur in his book.
Douglas Adams gets to the podium at 2:20 and takes a while to get into his stride, but from about 5:20 onwards this is worth watching and listening to. One thing : the video length is 1:19:19 but he finishes talking at 1:03:00. So he's up there talking for about 60 minutes, and I don't think he's still for any of that time. This is unusual, I don't recall seeing him do that anywhere else. Too late alas to ask him why he was doing it ...
I love his books and now I love his lectures too. Any more?
YES! My fav lecture is 'parrots the universe and everything.'
10000% bang on correct about evolution.
Oooft he knows his stuff, abit of a prophet in some ways.x
@39:45 "Human beings now have this extension to model..." ChatGPT, et. al. Who'd have thought it'd happen so quickly...
Start at 2:10 - good speech.
cartons of I, for one, greatly appreciated her cutting edge powerpoint presentation on how juice boxes were consumed at the Microsoft Convention in 1996
the meaning life universe and everything, talking about the train station. where your packet is under the paper.
wow this is so enlightening, and much of what he says is still relevent today.
❤️
Fwiw when he was talking about dolphins and sound. sound travels faster through water. they aren't limited like us.
A very wise man. Shame he can’t show more knowledge and insight.
28:38 boom !! mind == blown
13:55 His famous story about the biscuits
Did they ever find the gent who shared his biscuits?
He hasn't come forward, but that story has been repeated so often that whoever the guy was he must have heard it by now. But of course, he's the one without the punchline :)
When he discusses speciation at 49 minutes, he leaves out an extra aspect of “punctuated equilibrium.” What keeps the main population from adapting to cold? I think that is an ongoing question.
2:43 Douglas does Billie Joe Armstrong 2 decades before!!!!
What does pdc stand for? I thought it would be for permaculture design course.
LOL 38:35 the Mississippi is kicickingand turning, can’t hold her here much longer 😹
Microsoft conference and Java VM oh, if they knew how bad the software got.
2:17
to begin with adams, add #t=2m16s to the URL: th-cam.com/video/8UNG3cQoOEc/w-d-xo.html#t=2m16s
There is more data out there than we respond to. So is it arrogance or stupidity that we dismiss most of it?
And here I thought the 80’s were the low point of fashion
And here I thought there wouldn’t be some pillock making an irrelevant point
Or is it how long he has to wait, to re-start or install Windows.
I love this man, but I feel like the very clear conceptualisation of how the human evolution (the soul) producing mental models, being such a definitive way of capitulating this idea, being so well-understood but in itself stands in the way of specific models that each human may be attempting to develop experiencially
This speech is only 63 mins long. The last 16 mins are just silent blackness.
digital laptop.... lol
very relevant, mac is better than windows
Thing he is wrong on is human evolution We have only started.
Explain
@@UPTHETOWN evolution is a perpetual and non linear process. As our environment changes over time, our species must adapt and change to suit it or perish and leave the earth to better adapted animals.
Evolution doesn't necessarily make things better, just better suited to their environments.
If the environment doesn't change, competition within our species and between our species and other species will continue to drive evolution to favour some traits over others.
After credits teaser