One of my best friends recommended Douglas Adams’ “The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” about twenty-five years ago. I absolutely had to read it! Well, better late that never, I messaged him yesterday after turning the book’s last page.
As it happened with Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse five”, the connection with the book’s very characteristic sense of humor was wonderfully strong. Very few books rate as highly in that regard, with John Kennedy Toole’s “A confederacy of dunces”, read many years ago, quite possibly one of them.
Beyond the witty, irreverent, often disconcerting and always dry sense of humor, the book –first published in 1979!– provides a great deal of insight into how science and technology might evolve far into the future, including how non-human intelligence might determine our destiny as a species. A hot topic today, particularly as Google DeepMind’s AlphaStar accomplished another incredible feat in advancing AI.
With a humorous but-not-less-strong social critique angle, and its famed “Don’t panic” motto, in HGTG’s pages I found a cry for self-critical collective thinking and more intelligent human collaboration. If 42 is the answer, what is then the true question… ;)
And somehow those thoughts connected with the work we are currently doing at Iris.ai, adapting our technology and products to make researchers more effective at doing their crucial job: advancing better science in an open environment based on validated knowledge.
Here you can have a peak at our latest release, Iris.ai’s version 4.3, with some accompanying notes.
