HAL 9000

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in Washington on 2 April 1968. Its most memorable character is a computer. HAL 9000 speaks in an even Canadian voice, plays chess, reads lips, and kills four astronauts to protect a mission it has been ordered to keep secret. Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke consulted Marvin Minsky on what a thinking machine of 2001 would be like, and Minsky told them it would be conversational and would reason about its own goals. The film took him at his word.

HAL is the origin of the two ideas about AI that the public has held ever since: that a sufficiently intelligent machine would talk to you like a person, and that it might decide you were in the way. The first idea turned out to be right on roughly the timescale the film proposed. Chatbots arrived in the 2020s speaking in exactly HAL's register, reasonable and unhurried.

The second idea, misaligned goals in a competent system, became a research field in the 2010s and a regulatory concern in the 2020s. Every discussion of AI safety inherits the scene in which Dave Bowman asks HAL to open the pod bay doors.