four ages of sand | light matters

I have just listened to a talk which Douglas Adams gave ten years ago in Cambridge, “off the cuff”, at the Biota2 conference. It was one of the biota.org podcasts, a series put together by Tom Barbalet, and this one blows my mind !
A fantastic talk about the four ages of sand, linking lenses, computers and networks together in a majestic arch, about big questions that can just go away, avoiding the need of explanation. The question he sets out exploring is: “is there an artificial god, since there seems to be something like artificial life ?” A question that seemed very odd to me at first, but his exploration of it covers enormous ground and is hugely interesting. And yes, there is one, he concludes, but it hardly seems the main point of his talk.

Joost Rekveld