By hand or machine
In 2001: A Space Odyssey , an iPad is released. This has always been described as one of the thousand manifestations of the visionary genius of its director, Stanley Kubrick. But I'd like to show that 2001 , if it's capable of anticipating the future, is one that's about to arrive.
Science fiction was born in 1818 with Frankenstein , in which Mary Shelley imagines a man who tries to create life by eliminating women from the equation, but one of the genre's most popular symbols, futuristic fantasy, would take many years to become a pop phenomenon. Kubrick's film is one of the icons of the 1960s, the same decade in which Barbarella , The Terror in Outer Space , Fantastic Voyage were released ... so many films that, along with Star Trek , Jack Kirby comics, cosmic rock and others, inaugurated the possibility that everyone, when thinking about the future, would think of the same type of clothing, furniture, technology. And to this day, every time a company has wanted to sell futurism, whether in the form of tablets , virtual reality glasses or bladeless fans, it has been very clear that all of us, investors and consumers, have seen the same movies since we were children. They know it's appropriate for silhouettes to curve gently and buttons to be invisible, so that the gadget sounds like the future, even if it's a future from the last century. The iPad in 2001 isn't a premonition; it's inspiration. It's the same reason why there was such a rush to introduce us to ChatGPT, even if it was still in a defective state. OpenAI knew that, of all the manifestations of its new technology, the one that would most strongly ingrain itself in our imagination and expectations was the possibility of having a conversation with an artificial intelligence. Because we all remember HAL.
Any AI can explain to you in a paragraph what the monolith in 2001 means. What still requires a human response is why half the film is a horror story that seems disconnected from the rest of the film. In this fable full of hope on a cosmic scale, why is there a killer computer? Why does it seem so important to destroy HAL before crossing the stargate? In the prologue, an ancestor of humanity experiences an evolutionary leap when he holds a bone in his hand and the first tool is born. But if we want to survive and transcend as a species, the battle will be against the ultimate tool, the one that makes us humans obsolete. And how could we win? Remember the scene where Bohman rips out HAL's hard drives? Exactly. We'll have to do it by hand.
elmundo
