![]() ![]() ![]() To put it bluntly and brutally, the machine is going to take over. Biological evolution has given way to a far more rapid process-technological evolution. The tool we have invented is our successor. They were very primitive tools… yet they led to us-and to the eventual extinction of the apeman who first wielded them… The tools the apemen invented caused them to evolve into their successor, Homo sapiens. The old idea that Man invented tools is… a misleading half-truth it would be more accurate to say that tools invented Man. In Profiles of the Future, published in 1962, Clarke wrote: It was a tool, and as the first part of 2001: A space Odyssey shows, tools can be used to help humanity or as a weapon in humanity’s wars. And like nuclear energy, the System/360 and all the computers and networks of computers that came after it, could be used for creation or for destruction. They started the four-year process of developing the film in 1964, the year IBM introduced its own masterpiece, the computer that sealed the company’s domination of the industry for the next quarter of a century, the System/360 (see April 7 This Day In Data ).įortune magazine described the development of the System/360 as the biggest privately financed commercial project ever undertaken, substantially larger than the World War II effort that produced the atom bomb. That both Clarke and Kubrick have denied any intentional reference to IBM may had to do with the fact that IBM was one of the many organizations and individuals consulted while they created the film. And that means that it can work on a program’s already set up, or it can look around for better solutions and you get the best of both worlds. But, in fact, as I’ve said, in the book, HAL stands for Heuristic Algorithmic, H-A-L. I’ve been trying for years to stamp out the legend that HAL was derived from IBM by the transmission of one letter. I don’t know again when we changed to HAL. ![]() At one time we were going to have a female voice. Of course the key person in the expedition was the computer HAL, who as everyone said is the only human character in the movie. Clarke, who worked with the director Stanley Kubrick on the plot for the movie (and later published a novel with the same title), said in an interview : The Science-fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. “Catchphrases like HAL’s chilling ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave’,” says Paul Whitington, “entered the popular lexicon.” Hollywood ending required that the one surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman, will triumph over the human-like machine. HAL 9000 became known, even by many people who did not watch the movie, as the artificially intelligent computer killing one after the other the astronauts on a mission to Jupiter. ![]()
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