In a world of AI deepfakes, fake news, and manipulated media, how do we know what’s real anymore?
Join futurist Graeme Codrington as he blends science fiction and foresight in this mind-bending episode of ThrowForward Thursday, inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
This Week on ThrowForward Thursday
Douglas Adams’ classic story predicted today’s world – crowdsourced “truths,” social networks, and reality distortion fields long before they existed.
In this episode, Graeme unpacks what The Hitchhiker’s Guide can teach us about:
- AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes
- The manipulation of truth in media and politics
- Why scepticism and curiosity are leadership superpowers
- How to lead with clarity when facts are contested
If you’re a leader, educator, or curious thinker trying to make sense of our post-truth world, this one’s for you.
💡 What You’ll Learn
- How Douglas Adams foresaw our information-saturated future
- The connection between AI, social media, and “reality distortion fields”
- Ways to stay sceptical without losing trust or hope
- How to build credibility and clarity in confusing times
- Why humour, humility, and courage matter in leadership today
Don’t Panic. Those are the immortal words on the front cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, at least according to Douglas Adams in his famous series of books.
Don’t Panic. That is probably good advice for us in the world today, wherever we find ourselves in the universe. This is ThrowForward Thursday. I’m Graeme Codrington, your tour guide to the future, and over the last two weeks, we’ve had a look at deep fakes, fake news, and what we should be doing in response to the fact that we can’t really trust the information in the world around us. We’ve not been able to trust texts for centuries, but now we can’t trust photos or videos either. What do we do about it?
Well, this week, I want to do something slightly different. I’m a huge fan of Douglas Adams and his series of books, which were based on radio plays, actually, from the 1970s and ’80s, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And I want to just have a quick look at what Douglas Adams said about the future and about how we should deal with social media, AI and fake news.
Now, you might think that a guy who passed away in 2001, sadly very young at the age of 49, but that somebody like that might have nothing to say about a world he knew nothing of. If you’ve read the books and know the stories, you might want to go back to them because I think that Douglas Adams was not just a fantastic author; he certainly had a Monty Python level of humour, which I appreciate, but he was a deep philosopher about the world and the world systems, and his books are amazing. I’m a fan. You can tell.
But let’s just have a quick look at those stories. First of all, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself was essentially TripAdvisor and Wikipedia put into one before either of those existed, put together in what we would recognise today as a Kindle. And so he was anticipating types of technology, having that thing in the palm of your hand, and then also the crowdsourcing of travel information.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was meant to give crowdsourced information about all the different planets in the universe. By the way, the entry for planet Earth, where we live, had only two words, and it was mostly harmless. I suppose. It depends if you live here or not. But that idea of the fact that we could have a social media platform like a Wikipedia or a TripAdvisor, getting people’s inputs, was definitely something that Douglas anticipated.
In fact, he actually tried to build a social network, and his picture of a social network, if we go back to last week’s session, where we looked at some of the policy frameworks which would be useful. His picture was that it needed to be curated. It needed to have fact-checking and some policies around content creation in order to be useful.
I think that he would be most familiar, maybe with Blue Sky, and be fairly happy with Wikipedia and how it works. But the free-for-all of Facebook and even worse, Twitter or X, where it’s deliberately designed for rage baiting, I think he would have absolutely been horrified. In fact, he might have had the same reaction that his famous robot, Marvin, did. Marvin was famously a depressed robot. His immortal line of, I have a brain the size of a small planet, and here they are getting me to pick up a piece of paper off the floor.
I actually wonder whether ChatGPT and all these other large language model GPT systems, if they would be a little bit better if they were slightly more depressed or had a more realistic personality rather than a very sick apophantic. “Hey, Graeme, what a wonderful question, this is amazing that you asked this question. You are so amazing, Graeme.” Yeah, I don’t know. But again, I think that Douglas Adams might have had a bit more of an influence if he had still been around.
He was, in fact, quite good friends with the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates back in the day. And it was him, Douglas Adams, who I believe is credited with coming up with the phrase of the reality distortion field, which he meant in a very bad way, and I think that’s exactly where deep fakes get us.
But here’s the piece that I wanted to point out. In the headquarters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where all of these entries were collated and the guide itself was written, there’s a lovely poster put up on the wall which said something, I forget the exact quote, but the guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate.
In other words, if you arrive at a planet and you discover it’s not quite as the guide defined it, the reality in front of you is incorrect. The guide is the definitive and correct version. Yes, of course, it’s meant as a little bit of humour and irony and sarcasm and whatever else you want to call it. But it is an interesting flow in his books, because in the last book, The Vogons, who are the evilest of evil, megalomaniac, profit-seeking race in his books, they actually buy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They upgrade it to what they call Mark Two. It is an organisation called Megadodo as a front end to the Vogons. Apologies if you’re not a science fiction fan, and all of this sounds very strange. Don’t worry, there is still a point.
They buy the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and then set about attempting to change reality to match what is in the guide. Now, that might not sound too much of a problem, except at that stage, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy listed planet Earth as destroyed, no longer existing. And so Megadodo comes to attempt to destroy planet Earth in order to make it align with the guide.
I think you can see the commentary on technology, on information, on politics, on the involvement of rich people in not just politics, but culture. And I think if you’re awake, you can see why I think there’s a strong connection to this world of deep fakes, where it isn’t people creating deep fakes just for fun or just because they’ve got nothing else to do, but they are creating deep fakes in order to influence reality.
The first step is always to test. Is it possible? Someone might, I’m just giving hypothetical examples here, just in a democratic country, might just say in a press conference, “Well, you know, I think people would enjoy where, having a dictator rather than a democratic President”. And it’s just a thrown-out line. And then they say, “Of course, I don’t want to be a dictator”. But they’re testing, right? They’re testing how this information would land, or it’s more than this information; they are testing whether the words they are saying could influence people’s perceptions. And of course, we know that they do.
Then you would go a step further by trying to put things out into the press and the media and onto social media platforms that just say things as if they were, even when they’re not. And then see if you can influence reality itself. And of course, you can. That is the problem we’ve been talking about for the past two weeks.
It might be, and I think this is where Douglas Adams ends up with his picture of this universe and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and the takeover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide by a rich organisation attempting to shape reality to fit its view of the universe.
I think Douglas Adams would probably say it is not possible for there to be truth. He believed, not he believed, he created a world in which planet Earth was a giant computer trying to find the question to the answer of the life universe and everything, which was 42. We know the answer is 42. We just didn’t know what the question was, and it was a five-billion-year experiment to find out the question, and the Earth was destroyed before it was restored. Anyway, you don’t have to get in. Spoilers if you haven’t ever read the book. But the Earth was destroyed just a few moments before the question was revealed. Anyway, if you like that stuff, you’ll love his books.
But here’s the point. Is there truth? Yes, there probably is. Can any individual know the truth? Well, these are the great philosophical questions of all time, and we need to be just a little bit more sceptical of what we believe truth to be. We need to be just a little bit more curious about whether our truth could be improved, and we need to be a little bit more bold and courageous in fighting for whatever version of truth makes the world a better place for everyone. That’s my view of what we should be doing together as a community, as a society, and you can call that justice if you want to.
We have to do this. We now live in a truly post-truth world, and the implications of living in such a world are immense. The ability of rich people who control the media and the platforms on which information is shared have an extraordinary power to shape our world, our worldviews, limit our view, cause chaos, cause trouble, and change the world. And we need to make sure that we are all eyes wide open to that reality and willing to invest our personal time and resources as well as our community policies to make sure that however all of that works, we end up with the best world possible for the most number of people.
That’s the end of our mini-series, looking back at the three episodes that we looked at deep fakes and fake news and AI’s involvement in that, I hope that this going back to where we came from, to look at where we’re going, gives you a lot to think about what we have to do right now.
Thanks, as always, for joining me in the ThrowForward Thursday studio. If there’s any way in which our team at TomorrowToday can assist you and your team to make sense of this post-truth world that we live in and open up your eyes, overcome your cognitive biases towards change, curiosity, and complexity, well, please make sure that you contact us, give us a call, and we’re happy to talk about how we can assist you.
Otherwise, have a great week. I’ll see you next week in the future, again.
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For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.