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This is a view of the far distant future, and Adams readily admits that computers have a long way to go before such a scenario could ever prove likely. In fact, given our resistance to reading and responding to things on a screen, they have to stop looking like computers at all. But as MIT guru Nicholas Negroponte has pointed out in his visionary book, Being Digital, computers will soon be integrated even further into the fabric of our daily lives. Scientists are now talking about tiny computers a billion times faster than our present ones, computers which can be incorporated into almost anything and everything around us. Adams describes the present ones as 'fridge-sized' objects, and feels we are still far too aware of computers and what we do or don't like about them. In the future, he predicts, we won't have to work out what it is we will have in the corner of the room, as networked computers will disappear into all the devices we use. 'Technology', as the visionary Bran Ferren has pointed out, 'is something that doesn't work yet'. When it's working, Douglas Adams is convinced that we can relax and forget about it.
If all this sounds a bit disconcerting and you are feeling left behind by the speed of change, then Adams uses a skiing analogy to help give you confidence. "Life is always in motion. We can either resist the pull of that motion and try painfully to edge our way along the edge, or lean out from the slope and just go for it. The world is changing very fast, but the truth is that life has always changed. In the past we've just thought of change as a mild irritant. Now it's so fast we'll have to think of it differently." If Adams's vision of the future proves accurate, then the information superhighway developed so far may prove to have only been the nursery slope.
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