How Douglas Adams predicted the future

Telegraph

17-03-2025

The other day, while gawping in wonderment at the dashboard of a Tesla, Donald Trump coined a memorable phrase: 'Wow – everything's computer!'
I couldn't help thinking of Douglas Adams. Not Adams's ideas on democracy – though they're worth quoting: people who want to rule over others are 'those least suited to doing it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.'
Rather, I was thinking that Trump was right – everything is computer, in a way that would have surprised Adams not one jot. I watched that Tesla video on a touchscreen computer small enough to carry around with me. It's a telephone, television, encyclopaedia and travel guide rolled into one. Perhaps you even have one yourself.
The smartphone is, of course, not entirely unlike the gadget Adams dreamed of one night in the 1970s, while lying drunk in a field on a backpacking holiday, and staring up at the stars: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The title of a new documentary – Douglas Adams: The Man who Imagined Our Future – suggests that the comic novelist was a kind of digital Nostradamus.
Adams didn't want to be seen as a prophet. Hitchhiker's – which he pitched to the BBC aged just 25 – was less a vision of the future than his way of poking fun at a distinctly 1970s, distinctly British present. Its universe is one of petty bureaucrats hell-bent on building bypasses; one where the baffled Englishman abroad struggles to find a decent cup of tea. Technology in his novels is comically unreliable (though often in prescient ways).
'Trying to predict the future is a mug's game,' Adams once wrote, poking fun at other people's predictions. But on the rare occasions when he did risk a prediction, he was often right.
A hunger for high-speed data
In that same article about the 'mug's game' of prognostication, Adams quoted 'a Mr Wayne Leuck, vice-president of engineering at USWest, the American phone company. Arguing against the deployment of high-speed wireless data connections, he said, 'Granted, you could use it in your car going sixty miles an hour, but I don't think too many people are going to be doing that.''
'Just watch,' Adams wrote. 'That's a statement that will come back to haunt him. Satellite navigation. Wireless Internet. As soon as we start mapping physical location back into shared information space, we will trigger yet another explosive growth in Internet applications. At least – that's what I predict. I could, of course, be wildly wrong.'
But Adams was right. This kind of world-to-web mapping is now everywhere. If I want to find a friend in a park, I share a 'live location' on WhatsApp. If I get on a bus, Google Maps notices and asks me how crowded the bus is.
Chatting with paranoid androids
Today I asked a computer for the answer to everything. 'The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42,' replied Google's AI Overview, confidently parroting the joke-answer provided by a super-computer in Hitchhiker's. Not a useful answer, but at least not an unpleasant one. Would that all AIs were so amicable.
In 2016, Microsoft launched 'Tay', an AI chatbot with a 'personality' – and its own Twitter account. It swiftly turned into an anti-Semitic, sex-obsessed Neo-Nazi – then was switched off. A similar character-trajectory has bedevilled many chatbots since then. 'Tay' could easily have been a product of Adams's fictional Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, which gives robots 'Genuine People Personalities'.
'Urgh, sounds ghastly!' says Arthur Dent, the hero of Hitchhiker's, when he's told about these 'GPPs'.
'It is. Absolutely ghastly,' replies Marvin, the paranoid-depressive android who's been installed with one. Marvin's anomie is an anomaly; most devices in Hitchhiker's are relentlessly cheerful, even those which categorically don't need a personality, such as the automatic doors.
For instance, Eddie, the spaceship computer, greets its passengers with a chirpy American 'Hey, guys!' – before breezily breaking the news that they're all about to die.
In 2025, Eddie is everywhere. Look for customer services online, and there's a strong chance you'll find yourself typing into a box, arguing with a chatbot that has a real person's name, a shallow imitation of a friendly 'hey, guys!' personality, and zero ability to actually solve your problem.
Something simple you can use in the bath
Writing an article on (and about) a palmtop computer in 1996, Adams correctly predicted that phone-sized computers would become commonplace: 'this is just the beginning of that crucial moment at which something stops being just an entertaining new toy and starts being something you can seriously use in the bath.'
Adams's hatred of faff, of 'dongly things' and cables ('Dickens didn't have to crawl around under his desk trying to match plugs!') made him an advocate for wireless tech and intuitive software. 'We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works,' he wrote. 'How do you recognise something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.'
The natural order of things
Adams once set out three rules describing our basic attitude to technology:
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 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything that's invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.
But the reverse was true for him; after 35, Adams fell in love with tech. He once joked that people saw him as a 'turncoat' for mocking technology as a young novelist, then championing it as a middle-aged journalist.
But in one beautifully written and surprising article, he explained that he fell in love with tech around the same time he fell in love with nature. (After meeting the naturalist Mark Cawardine, Adams became a committed conservationist in the 1990s; my favourite Adams book is their co-authored Last Chance to See, in which they tour the world tracking endangered animals.)
Adams was fascinated by evolution, and saw a parallel between DNA (his initials, incidentally) and computer code – in his view, both create something beautifully complex from this simplest possible building blocks, and 'being able to watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon.'
Instant translation
In Hitchhiker's, Adams imagined a world where a nifty device could seamlessly translate any language into another. The device turns out to be a little yellow fish.
The idea of the 'Babel Fish' is introduced as an aside, and mostly serves as the set-up to a long, brilliant routine about theology, which has become a staple of philosophy classes. Adams's jokes have a way of doing this: no course on ethics is complete without a mention of his 'Dish of the Day', an articulate and intelligent animal specially bred to want to be eaten. (Is this morally better or worse than eating a dumb, unwilling cow?)
Taking inspiration from Adams, the earliest online instant-translation programme was named after his fictional creature: Babel Fish launched nine years before Google Translate. The company that owned Babel Fish was later taken over by another company that was in turn taken over by Yahoo. (The big fish always eats the little fish.)
A hitchhiker's guide to Earth
Before Wikipedia, Facebook or Twitter, there was H2G2: an attempt to create a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy here on Earth. Adams's website was a sprawling, community-sourced online encyclopaedia – one that also included a social network and microblogging platform for its contributors.
It was launched to great fanfare in 1999, and within a few months became the most visited mobile-phone-compatible website in Europe. Suddenly, backpackers across Europe could pull a little device out of their pockets, and learn about the history of brie, or where to get a good cocktail in Prague. The Guide Adams had dreamt of under the stars was real.
It's easy to imagine a parallel universe where H2G2 became as vast as Wikipedia or Facebook. But when the Dotcom bubble burst in 2000, it ruined Adams's company. H2G2 was passed on to the BBC, which kept the site running (albeit on a much reduced scale). For years afterwards, new articles were regularly added by thousands of writers. (I should disclose here that, in 2006, one of those writers was a spotty and insufferable 13-year-old called Tristram Fane Saunders. I was both peeved and proud to learn, years later, that one of my H2G2 entries had been plagiarised by Wikipedia.)
The future of comedy
Adams – who proclaimed the importance of always knowing where your towel is (his fans celebrate 'Towel Day' in May each year) – died while reaching for a towel, after a gym workout, in 2001, years before Twitter and iPhones and much else besides.
We could wonder how he would have seen those innovations. He might have had ideas on improving them, as he did with Amazon. (In one column, he wrote about getting in touch with Amazon regarding the site's data-gathering, peeved by what he saw as a major flaw – and they took up his suggestion.)
But to treat him as a tech soothsayer is to miss the point; his real legacy is his humour. Every British comic novelist has a little of his DNA; the style and cadence of his jokes is everywhere. Reading Adams for the science would be as wrongheaded as reading PG Wodehouse for the plots. (He was an enormous admirer of Wodehouse, and it shows.)
One moment in the new documentary reminds us how radical Adams's frivolous approach to sci-fi seemed at the time: we hear an archival clip in which an interviewer warns that 'comedy might destroy the seriousness with which this very proper genre should be taken'.
It reminded me of Adams's reply to critics who turned up their noses at Wodehouse, saying 'He's just not serious': 'He doesn't need to be serious. He's better than that.'