Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)

Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets. That spring, we featured here on Open Culture an amusing retro-technological diversion called Hyperland. First broadcast on BBC2, the program stars The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams as himself and Doctor Who’s Tom Baker as his agent. “You want fifteen percent?” the former asks the latter when they first meet in a vast wasteland of flickering television sets. Not at all: “I’m here to do your every slightest bidding,” Baker explains, “to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial.”

Today, we can hardly share in Adams’ bewilderment, familiar as we are with the notion of what Baker calls a “software agent,” an “artificial and completely customizable personality” with “instant access to every piece of information stored digitally anywhere in the world: any picture or film, any sound, any book, any statistic, any fact, any connection between anything you care to think of.” We must remind ourselves that Hyperland was produced in 1990, when these lines would have struck all but the most computer-savvy and forward-looking viewers as sheer science fiction. Even three decades thereafter, they still sounded more or less like an elevated version of ordinary late-twentieth-century techno-optimism. Here in 2026, Baker’s services are close to being considered a basic necessity, at least in Silicon Valley and its global provinces.

Not so very long ago, Hyperland looked startlingly prescient about the rise of the World Wide Web, which would soon let its users seek out their own desired pieces of information and media, actively moving through links between them, in a manner unlike the passive viewing experience of television (with which it would, as no one then knew, one day converge). This was an unfamiliar idea to most people in 1990; hence the variety of clear and entertaining ways in which the program breaks down its technological basis, pulling up clips from its onscreen “database” like an interview with Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext. Like multimedia, that word may carry a whiff of antiquity today, but it was once on the lips of practically every technologist in popular culture — in a manner reminiscent of the lexicon that has sprung from new developments in artificial intelligence over the past few years.

At times, Baker’s character now looks almost realistic, as when Adams asks him to knock off the obsequiousness, or when he pulls up Kurt Vonnegut’s theory of story form before Adams fully gets the question out. Yet Hyperland devotes little time to AI per se. The program appeared in the wake of the eighties’ AI boom, when “expert systems” promised to solve problems in industry, medicine, and other sectors, but many of the field’s larger ambitions went unrealized. There followed a long “AI winter” in research and development, in whose climate Baker-as-“agent” would have been a means of humanizing an abstract-seeming concept of organizing and navigating information. Not that all his enthusiastically proffered services draw unqualified enthusiasm from Adams, who possessed a rare combination of Californian technophilia and British skepticism. His fascination with humanity’s digital future is ours — and so is his wariness.

via Mefi

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