Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".
Interpretation
This quote humorously highlights the inevitability of change and the unpredictability of technology.
Douglas Adams' quote reflects on the nature of progress and innovation, particularly in the tech industry, where companies often face challenges and uncertainties. By acknowledging both the imperfections in their products and their foresight regarding the future—specifically the end of the century—the quote captures a playful yet insightful perspective on the evolution of technology and the importance of adaptability amid uncertainty.
In practice
In a tech conference presentation when discussing the evolution of products over the years.
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
I believe this artificial intelligence is going to be our partner. If we misuse it, it will be a risk. If we use it right, it can be our partner.
Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.
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