time for a poem

Post photo: Enjoying coffee | © Pixabay

Today's poem is attributed to Marvin and is therefore often referred to as "Marvin's lullaby". Many of my readers will immediately think of Douglas Adams think, whereby Detlef Stern and I fear that even in our own lifetimes fewer and fewer people are making this connection.

How I Hate the Night

Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night

Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night

Marvin (Douglas Adams)

Marvin excitingly references with “try to count electric sheep” Philip K. Dick s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” This novel in turn inspired Ridley Scott to the movie "Blade Runner“, which was also already a topic here in the blog, which in turn reminds me of my own blog post “Repetitions and allusions" remind.

Which brings us back to “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, a book that I would like to use at least as secondary literature for my seminar “IT Systems”.

Before I get into it really elegantly with Marvin, I first try it with my new “UselessBox“, an idea that already Detlef Stern received positively.

But now back to Marvin, who is actually a robot. According to Douglas Adams from the “Sirius Cybernetics Corporation” and runs on software based on the infamous GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology. It is used as a (space) ship robot on the “Heart of Gold”.

If Marvin himself is to be believed, his brain is the size of a planet and he is a good 50 times more intelligent than, for example, Albert Einstein. And although Zaphod Beeblebrox called “Paranoid Android” and Ford Prefect liked to imagine him as a manic-depressive robot, in my opinion he is more of a modern example of a stoic.

To Douglas Adams Marvin should be characterized as follows:

“We never met. But when I asked Douglas what sort of character Marvin might be he told me he was a cross between eyore and Clément Freud (A descendant of Freud who was a chef and TV personality who had a face like a Doberman and talked very slowly and monotonously.)"

Stephen Moore in a Interview (31.3.2012)

Currently, the prices for a used Marvin are still astronomically high and so the students will probably have to continue to work on my Useless Box in the future.

But in just a few years, IPAI (a project for applied artificial intelligence) will be launched here, and so I am hopeful that something will come of the GPP technology after all. By then, I hope to have finished my essay “compulsion and time" complete.

Until then, I will continue to work on Martin Heidegger and wonder how much metaphysics, whether general or specific, is actually involved in AI. Hopefully not as much as in blockchain technology.

Addendum

There are actually two versions of Marvin. Namely the BBC (six-part television series from 1981) and the one from the film (2005). Both have probably achieved cult status by now.

Here you can find Marvin from the movie:

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