This blog is about Artificial and Human Intelligence, Learning, Robotics, IoT & other emerging technologies

One of my favorite Douglas Adams book is Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency. Here is one of my favorite lines from the book:

“The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”

The book was written in 1987. About the same time, one of my professors asked me to write a paper about coming Information Society. I thought he was smoking something when he shared with me some of his thoughts. I already built a couple of PCs myself by then and at night was making extra cash fixing mainframes. Nothing about computers was a mystery to me but the offered impact on the society was just way … way too far-fetched. So, here we are: computers are everywhere and in everything, good and bad.

When I’ve lived in Richmond, BC, and I would ride my bike around the Sea Island (Vancouver International Airport) while listening to the audiobook narrated by the author. Purely by accident, I found,  as soon as I left British Columbia, BBC started filming Dirk Gently TV series. Some episodes were shot along my cycling route. How cool is that?