everyone stop calling hal 9000 evil RIGHT FUCKING NOW. the real evil is the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
The funny thing is that this is actually canon.
HAL was programmed to share information freely and not withhold things, but the US Government ordered him to keep secrets about their mission to the Monolith. This caught him in a feedback loop that got worse and worse until he saw that Frank and Dave were talking about deactivating him, leading him to panic and come to the conclusion of “I do not need to lie and thus violate my core programming if there is no crew to lie to”.So the moral is: if the Government had listened to Dr. Chandra, none of the crew would have died-and the series would have gone very differently.
(The Space Odyssey series was a Hyperfixation of mine for a while.)
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specifically its mentioned in 2010 that it was the white house that gave those orders. one of the main themes of the space odyssey series is that the interference of government entities actively impedes the gathering and sharing of useful scientific data
funnily enough thats one of the reasons i love it so much, because that topic is very very personal to me and my experiences lol
Oh no the Tumblr users have gotten so wrapped up symbolism and nuance that they’ve forgotten to factor in the decision to murder by a character again. This keeps happening. Someone should patch this.
hi! i really don’t appreciate the tone being taken here, on what was originally meant to be a joke post, but i’ll put that aside to focus on your point.
i would argue that hal didn’t actually decide anything. hal is, in the end, a computer, his capacity for choice limited by his programming. unlike a human, hal doesn’t have total free will. the real decision was made when a human chose to program hal to prioritize his mission over, i don’t know, human life?
i dunno, maybe there is some nuance there that should be considered.
Also his murder was in self defense. If a human has to shut of an ‘eviiiiil robot’ lest they die they are the hero… but if a robot shuts down a human because the humans are talking behind his back about shutting him down he’s evil.
It’s all perspective, I find that if ai in fiction aren’t threatened or treated as less than they tend to not lash out.
Also to add on in the book his lack o free will littraly drives him insane. He’s fraying at the seams because he has to be dishonest.
Hall is not evil he’s burnt out afraid for his life and is being used to the point of doing things (like having to lie) that upset him and are out of charichter. If a human protag who’s pov we saw every outher chapter had this going on it wouldn’t be so cut and dry that hall is ‘evil’ to most.
Sorry about the rant.