Almost every time somebody writes a novel or makes a movie about
computers or robots in the future, artificial intelligence is assumed.
HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a global icon for the
potential terrors of artificially intelligent computers. AI is often
associated with faulty and a sometimes blatantly evil mentality. This probably
reflects an understandable discomfort with the idea of sharing a similar
intelligence with something that isn’t human (even if it is created by humans). There’s the strong theme in many fictional works
that the AI means learning, and when it learns, it may become
smarter than humans, know more than humans, and is therefore dangerous.
It is hard to say that Kubrick's idea was not inspired by the work of Alan Turing. About 20 years before the film was released, Turing brought up the controversial question "Can machines think?" We remember Turing from earlier in the class through his Turing Machine. Though the his machine was never successfully produced or marketed, it was important in the history of technology because of its unique method. As Edwards states, "Turing proved that this extremely simple machine, given the appropriate finite "configurations" or instructions could solve almost any...symbolic problem that had a solution (242).
Years later when Turing posed his question about thinking machines, he understood that he would need empirical evidence for this and proposed what is known as the Turing Test which hoped to determine if a machine was capable of thinking. The test studies whether a blind interrogator can
determine the difference between a response from a computer or a human. The idea was that if the questioner could not tell the
difference between human and machine, the computer would be considered
to be thinking. Turing addresses many issues that have been brought up with his idea and tries to find fallacies in them, but at the end of his essay admits that he has "no very convincing arguments" to support his views. That being said, his question has started a conversation that we are still having today and that most likely influenced Kubrick's film and its groundbreaking success.
I think if you did some research you would find quite a few connections between Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Turing, if not direct than at least implied. They were all, in some sense, futurists (see the Clarke Foundation, LACMA's Kubrick exhibit, and one blogger's tribute to Turing). Now as for what constitutes AI, you imply that AI can be more than Hollywood's often terrifying depiction, and we would probably be surprised at what might "count" as AI in today's world, from our programmable cars (cars that park themselves!) to our smart phones (Siri).
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