![]() In the 21st century, we worry about losing control of technology. Hollywood concentrates on exploiting our fears - in the late 20th century, we worried about ceding control to technology. A high school student played by Matthew Broderick nearly started World War III in WarGames (1983) when he thought he was hacking a computer company but accidentally challenged the Pentagon's defense network to a quick game of "global thermonuclear war." The problem, it soon became clear, was that no one told the defense network they were just "playing." Within just a couple of years, movie computers didn't just want spaceship domination in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), they wanted to take over the world.Īnd then this notion of technology-run-wild, ran wild. But HAL made an impression on the public where scientists had not. The term "artificial intelligence" wasn't even coined (by American computer scientist John McCarthy) until about a dozen years before Kubrick made his Space Odyssey. Wells and Jules Verne invented plenty of unorthodox devices as they sent characters to the center of the Earth, and into space and the recesses of time, without ever considering that those devices might want to do things on their own. And neither did the influential 19th-century science fiction writers who followed him. Over tens of thousands of years, Butler wondered, might humans not evolve in much the same way Darwin's study of natural selection had just established the rest of the plant and animal kingdoms do, to the point that we would become dependent on our devices?īut even when he incorporated that idea a decade later into a satirical novel called Erewhon, expounding for several chapters on self-replicating machines, Butler barely touched on the notion that those machines would develop consciousness. ![]() Samuel Butler's 1863 article Darwin Among the Machines, is generally thought to be the origin of this species of writing, and it mostly just notes that while humankind invented machines to assist us - and remember, a really sophisticated machine in 1863 was the steam locomotive - we were increasingly assisting them: tending, fueling, repairing. So his intelligent machine simply observed (with an unblinking red eye) and, when addressed directly, spoke with a calm, modulated voice, not unlike the one that would be adopted four decades later by Siri and Alexa.Įarlier literary notions of "artificial" intelligence - and there were not a lot of them at that point - hadn't really caught the public's imagination. Movie robots, at that point, were about brawn, not brain.Īnd anyway, malevolent robot stories were precisely the sort of B-movie silliness Kubrick was trying to avoid. There'd been films with, say, robots causing havoc, but they were generally robots doing someone else's bidding. It's hard to articulate what a genuine shock this was for 1960s movie audiences. ![]() This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it." "Open the pod bay door, HAL" became one of the most quoted film lines of the decade when the computer responded, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Their plan was short-circuited when HAL, lip-reading a conversation they'd managed to keep him from hearing, cast one of them adrift while he was outside the ship repairing an antenna and refused to let the other back on board. Programmed to run the mission flawlessly, the computer's behavior had become alarming, and two of the astronauts had decided to shut down some of its functions. So why was HAL acting so strangely? He (it?) was responsible for maintaining all aspects of a months-long space flight, ferrying astronauts to the moons of Jupiter. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error." HAL (for Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) introduced itself early in the film by saying, "No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. In 1968, for instance, the year before humans first set foot on the moon - and a time when astronauts still used pencils and slide rules to calculate re-entry trajectories because their space capsules had less computing power than a digital watch has today - Stanley Kubrick introduced movie audiences to a sentient HAL-9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Misuse of AI is part of what actors and writers are striking about in Hollywood, and the threat of AI is something Hollywood was imagining long before it was real. Artificial intelligence that can mimic conversation, whether written or spoken, has been in the news a lot this year, delighting some members of the public while worrying educators, politicians, the World Health Organization, and even some of the people developing AI technology. That's worth mentioning because it's no longer something you can just assume.
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