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I herewith promise that this is the last time I'm going to quote at length
from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I thought this was just too appropriate
not to share. As I was reading this I had all of "us" -- the collective,
ultra-conservative, techno-phobic but very philosophical translators -- in my
mind's eye:
"O Deep Thought Computer," he said,
"the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us
..." he paused, "... the Answer!"
"The answer?" said Deep Thought. "The
answer to what?"
"Life!" urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause.
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do
it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with
breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?" added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the
Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll
have to think about it."
A sudden commotion destroyed the moment: the door flew
open and two angry men wearing the coarse faded-blue robes and belts of the Cruxwan University burst into the room,
thrusting aside the ineffectual flunkies who tried to bar their way. "We
demand admission!" shouted the younger of the two men elbowing a pretty
young secretary in the throat.
"Come on," shouted the older one, "you
can't keep us out!" He pushed a junior programmer back through the door.
"We demand that you can't keep us out!"
bawled the younger one, though he was now firmly inside the room and no further
attempts were being made to stop him.
"Who are you?" said Lunkwill, rising angrily
from his seat. "What do you want?"
"I am Majikthise!" announced the older one.
"And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!"
shouted the younger one.
Majikthise turned on Vroomfondel. "It's
alright," he explained angrily, "you don't need to demand that."
"Alright!" bawled Vroomfondel banging on a
nearby desk. "I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid
fact! What we demand is solid facts!"
"No we don't!" exclaimed Majikthise in
irritation. "That is precisely what we don't demand!"
Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted,
"We don't demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid
facts. I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!"
"But who the devil are you?" exclaimed an
outraged Fook.
"We," said Majikthise, "are
Philosophers."
"Though we may not be," said Vroomfondel
waving a warning finger at the programmers.
"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We
are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of
Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this
machine off, and we want it off now!"
"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.
"I'll tell you what the problem is mate,"
said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"
"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that
demarcation may or may not be the problem!"
"You just let the machines get on with the adding
up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities
thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under
law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative
of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and
we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up
half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only
goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel,
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
Suddenly a stentorian voice boomed across the room.
"Might I make an observation at this point?"
inquired Deep Thought.
"We'll go on strike!" yelled Vroomfondel.
"That's right!" agreed Majikthise.
"You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands!"
The hum level in the room suddenly increased as
several ancillary bass driver units, mounted in sedately carved and varnished
cabinet speakers around the room, cut in to give Deep Thought's voice a little
more power.
"All I wanted to say," bellowed the
computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to
calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything -" he paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's
attention, before continuing more quietly, "but the programme will take me
a little while to run."
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
"How long?" he said.
"Seven and a half million years," said Deep
Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
"Seven and a half million years ...!" they
cried in chorus.
"Yes," declaimed Deep Thought, "I said
I'd have to think about it, didn't I? And it occurs to me that running a
programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity
for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone's going to have their own
theories about what answer I'm eventually to come up with, and who better to
capitalize on that media market than you yourself? So long as you can keep
disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the
popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How does that
sound?"
The two philosophers gaped at him.
"Bloody hell," said Majikthise, "now
that is what I call thinking. Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things
like that?"
"Dunno," said Vroomfondel in an awed
whisper, "think our brains must be too highly trained Majikthise."
So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out
of the door and into a lifestyle beyond their wildest dreams.
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