The advent of LLMs masquerading as artificial intelligence has made the notion of an absurdly powerful computer, constructed at great expense, and given unseemly resources to answer a meaningful question, only to return the answer “42”, feel more and more prophetic.
Here's a mind bender to Douglas Adams. He worked with computers in the 1970s and knew that 42 is the ASCII code for *.
An asterisk is used as a wild card. It can mean anything.
So the meaning of life is anything you want it to mean. 42.
The real answer to the meaning of life was given by the computer in the way a computer could relate it.
