Audiences walked out of the premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Students brought it back. Kubrick consulted Marvin Minsky, recorded a Canadian Shakespearean in a day and a half, and produced a machine that kills its crew without malice, because it has been given two orders that cannot both be obeyed. HAL is the first screen intelligence whose danger is competence in the service of a badly written specification, and his last act is to sing the first song a real computer ever sang.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Rain, Marvin Minsky, Max Mathews