Posted in: Comics | Tagged: ChatGPT, dirk gently, douglas adams

Did Douglas Adams Invent ChatGPT?

Plenty of people have looked at recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and compared them to the work of Douglas Adams... but here's a new one.

Plenty of people have looked at recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and compared them to the work of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, especially the Genuine People Personalities of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, such as Eddie The Shipboard Computer and Marvin The Paranoid Android, as well as Deep Thought. The people working on the projects are also influenced by Douglas Adams, to the extent that they charge pro users $42 a month. Elon Musk is also a major fan, buying Douglas Adams' typewriter, and sticking Don't Panic onto his space ships – though maybe not working out that he is a Magrathean.

But there's a bigger bit of insight away from Hitchhikers. From his Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, with Richard talking to Reg about the murdered Gordon Way's career,

"…it's to do with the project which first made the software incarnation of the company profitable. It was called Reason, and in its own way it was sensational."
"What was it?"
"Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It's funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want."
"Yeeesss…" said Reg's voice from the kitchen.
"Well, Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.
And I have to say it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when he wrote it off three weeks later."
"Heavens. And did the program sell very well?"
"No. We never sold a single copy."
"You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me."
"It was," said Richard hesitantly. "The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I've recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you're looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear."
'So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.'

It is, of course, later revealed that Gordon is murdered by an artificial intelligence that misunderstood an instruction given to it, and came up with the wrong answer…

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