Botworld
This is HAL, the artificial intelligence computer from the film.
An artificial intelligence is an intelligence, something sentient like a human or a cat, that isn’t part of the realm of organic life. It’s one that is man-made. The shortcut way of saying artificial intelligence is “A.I.,” so when I say A.I. later in this talk, that’s what I mean. A man-made intelligent being.
The still here is from the scene where HAL is dying, because he’s gone mad, and Dave Bowman, the astronaut, is having to deactivate him.
HAL sings a poem, and it’s heartbreaking. You really feel like someone is dying, like HAL was really alive.
So, somehow, in my upbringing, I got obsessed with the idea of having a computer friend, and with sci-fi and the future, in equal measure.
[Aside: In this interview with Stanley Kubrick, Kubrick speaks about HAL and 2001: “One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures. ... Such a machine could eventually become as incomprehensible as a human being.”]