#2001 HAL SOFTWARE#
#2001 HAL PROFESSIONAL#

In this situation, why do we expect AI to behave differently than we do? We forget that for AI to be truly AI, its intelligence should be indistinguishable from that of a human’s. When overlaid on idealism of the Silicon Valley variety, AI in our imagination suddenly becomes able to do what we have never been able to ourselves, even as we assume humans will still be in control. There’s a popular adage that describes how we think of AI: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. This can be Siri being sexist or predictive policing algorithms amplifying racial biases in the real world. We have found that their algorithms often inherit the biases of their makers, and that their makers often don’t realise this until the issue is called out. Some scientists think the next step should be AI that can engage in “open-ended collaborative efforts” instead of playing solo towards well-defined outcomes.īut in the meantime, we come across examples every week that these machines are nothing like what popular science fiction has taught us to expect.

There is a long way to go for HAL-like artificial general intelligence, assuming that is even possible. Using the tools and methods of ‘Big Data’ and machine learning, machines have defeated human players at chess and Go, solved problems in materials science and helped diagnose some diseases better. In the last 50 years, HAL has been able to step into our public consciousness as a cautionary allegory against our over-optimism towards AI and remind us that weapons of mass destruction can take different forms. In turn, 2001 is the story of HAL’s tragedy, a hero scapegoated into ignominy because his sleepwalking compatriots awaken from their slumber at the climax to find themselves on the threshold of disaster. Kubrick originally intended to end his film with a nuclear holocaust that he did not allowed HAL to take centerstage as the primary antagonist. Minsky’s thoughts are chillingly evocative of what Facebook has achieved in 2018.

#2001 HAL SOFTWARE#

According to anthropologist Chris Knight, this ‘act’ inspired Minsky, a cognitive scientist, to wonder if the mind in the form of software could be separated from the body, the hardware. In the late 1950s, the linguist and not-yet-activist Noam Chomsky had reimagined the inner workings of the human brain as those of a computer (specifically, as a “Language Acquisition Device”). Less than a decade later, he joined the production team of 2001 as a consultant to design and realise the character called HAL. That scientist was Marvin Minsky, who founded the AI Lab at MIT in 1959. But retrofit him in a Stanley Kubrick film and have him embody the vision of a scientist who once said, “the most important thing about each person is the data” – and you have not a villain waylaid by complicated Boolean algebra but a reflection of human hubris just the way Facebook has become. Within the ultra-rationalist dystopia narrative that science fiction writers have abused for decades, HAL is not remarkable. Only HAL knows the real nature of the mission, which in Kafkaesque fashion is never revealed. In 2001, HAL serves as the onboard computer for an interplanetary spaceship carrying a crew of astronauts to a point near Jupiter, where a mysterious black monolith of alien origin has been spotted.

It is an artificial intelligence (AI) the likes of which we are yet to confront in 2018 but have learnt to constantly anticipate. It is worth comparing Facebook’s evolution to another misunderstood creature, this one more crafty, probably just as damaging and similarly iconic: HAL 9000, the artificial general intelligence in Stanley Kubricks’s iconic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

#2001 HAL PROFESSIONAL#

Gary Greenberg, a mental health professional and author, recently wrote that the similarities between Frankenstein’s monster – who turns 100 this year – and Facebook were unmistakable except on one count: the absence of a conscience was a bug in the monster, and remains a feature in Facebook. Since news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke last month, many have expressed apprehension that Facebook has transformed since its juvenile beginnings into an ugly monster.

2001 hal