Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt 8 (2001: A Space Odyssey)

2001: a Space Odyssey is either about everything or it’s about nothing. It’s either a hard long look at what defines us as human beings or it’s an over-elaborate, misguided, pseudo intellectual head trip, all scenery and no substance. In refusing to be explicitly about any one thing it necessarily risks taking on too many implied meanings and thus alienates many viewers who spend the whole film waiting for the story to begin.

Another way of considering it is as a sounding. Instead of a message being sent out to the world it works like a radar ping, reading the depth and contour of those it encounters. Films like 2001, that never cease widening their scope until they simply dissipate into grandiosity (see also Terrence Malik’s Tree of Life), often work by establishing and repeating themes. For 2001 the repeated theme is the advance of consciousness.

Whether it is the human ancestors on the parched plain reaching a new level by being pushed into tool use, or the human astronaut being shown the interconnected nature of time and existence just before becoming the transcendent star child, Stanley Kubrick’s film takes tremendous pain to observe these moments of psychic punctuated-equilibrium, when the human experience leaps suddenly forward.

The most important and indelible statement of this theme is also the central event in the film. It is the part that bears the nearest resemblance to traditional film plotting and is also the most memorable passage in the movie. The arc of the HAL 9000 A.I. acts as restatement and elaboration of the theme of emergent consciousness as conceived by Kubrick and the film’s co-writer Arthur C. Clark.

As presented in 2001 consciousness is only as real as a being’s ability to impose their own will upon others. For the human ancestors in the first portion of the film their survival is ensured by becoming aware of their ability to use tools and thereby impose changes on their surroundings through violence. For HAL 9000 sentience is hinted at when he begins to act violently out of self preservation. With man’s next leap in evolution just over the horizon, awaiting the astronauts near Jupiter, their previous means of advancement, tools and violence (both embodied by HAL 9000) threaten to stop them up short.

In other films on this list A.I. are presented as surrogates for humankind’s fear of loneliness, intimacy, and the unknown. In 2001 artificial intelligence is a mirror of our journey, reflection of what has brought us this far as a species: invention, survival, and barbarity. And significantly, just before the main human figure of the last half of the film, Dave Bowman, is hurtled into the far reaches of human potential, he must over come and abandon mankind’s highest technological achievement, a machine who can say just before he is deactivated, not “I love you” as in A.I. or “What am I?” as in Under the Skin, or “I have grown beyond you” as in Her, but instead, “I am frightened.” A machine aware of its inherent smallness and vulnerability is a machine that would at last be most like us.

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

HER

UNDER THE SKIN

EX-MACHINA

AUTOMATA

AI