Rice pudding and income tax

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And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its databanks had been connected up it had started from “I think, therefore I am” and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.

—Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adam’s famous passage from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which in these pages exists mainly to lampoon modernists, determinists and those who labour under the illusion that technology can fix deeply-seated human problems.

See also

• High modernism
• Data modernism
• Determinism