An interview with Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams was a writer and author best known for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Sadly, he died of a massive heart attack in 2001 aged only 49. Each year, fans of his work celebrate the 25th of May (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 William 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 2 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 ever think about the computer inside our smart phones and tablets.
In 2015, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said something similar about the Internet. Once a technology becomes ubiquitous, it becomes invisible.
(c) Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Http://abc.net.au/science