How can humans outsmart the robot?
The worlds of film and fiction writing have always contained fascinating predictions of how we would live in the future. Some have been way off, but Arthur C. Clarke’s visions of the 21st century were more perceptive than most. In 1966, in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, he created the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It starred a robot called HAL 9000, a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic (HAL) computer endowed with artificial intelligence. The movie was a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of disaster caused by placing too much power or faith in a machine who, arguably, has no real conscience or awareness. Are we at risk of repeating this screenplay?
The worlds of film and fiction writing have always contained fascinating predictions of how we would live in the future. Some have been way off, but Arthur C. Clarke’s visions of the 21st century were more perceptive than most. In 1966, in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, he created the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It starred a robot called HAL 9000, a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic (HAL) computer endowed with artificial intelligence. The movie was a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of disaster caused by placing too much power or faith in a machine who, arguably, has no real conscience or awareness. Are we at risk of repeating this screenplay?
