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A rare Douglas Adams interview for Towel Day

"Technology is stuff that doesn't quite work yet."

Douglas Adams was a writer and author best known for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Sadly, he died of a massive heart attack in 2001 aged only 49. Each year, fans of his work celebrate May 25 (or "Towel Day") as a tribute to the author.

This clip is from a 1999 interview when Douglas Adams spoke to ABC Science Show presenter Robyn Williams about Y2K, the future of computer games and the future of the computer itself.

At the time, the world was preparing for January 1, 2000 (Y2K), when the vast library of computer software that used just two digits to describe the year would be unable to tell the difference between 1900 and 2000, and therefore suddenly malfunction in unforeseen ways.

As Douglas Adams pointed out — the computer industry was the one industry in the world that failed to predict that the century was going to end! (Fortunately, copious amounts of money spent on software upgrades meant that the Y2K risk was averted).

In the interview Douglas Adams also talked about his computer game Starship Titanic, the economics of computer games, and the future of computers.

"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."

Some of what Douglas Adams was talking about has already come to pass. (Most of us no longer think of our smart phones and tablets as computers).

In 2015, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said something similar about the internet. Once a technology becomes ubiquitous, it becomes invisible.

This video is also available on YouTube, via ABCScienceOnline

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