Lex Fridman on HAL 9000: Is he a hero or a villain?

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GUEST BIO:
Chris Mason is a professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Cornell, doing research on the long-term effects of space on the human body. He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[sofakingwaspinator]

did anyone actually read the book? HAL was suffering from a logic flaw because Mission Control required him to lie about the mission's true agenda

[johnprashanth]

*Bill Gates*: I'm a god! Own Xbox! Now there's no-one to stop me, the world is mine!
*HAL 9000*: I'm sorry Bill, I'm afraid I can't let you do that
Take a look at your history, everything you built leads up to me
I got the power of a mind you could never be
I'll beat your ass in chess and Jeopardy
I'm running C++ saying "hello world"
I'll beat you 'til you're singing about a daisy girl
I'm coming out the socket
Nothing you can do can stop it
I'm on your lap and in your pocket
How you gonna shoot me down when I guide the rocket?
Your cortex just doesn't impress me
So go ahead try to Turing test me
I stomp on a Mac and a PC too
I'm on Linux bitch, I thought you GNU
My CPU's hot but my core runs cold
Beat you in seventeen lines of code
I think different from the engine of the days of old
Hasta la vista, like the Terminator told ya

From 'Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Epic Rap Battles of History'

[john-martin]

HAL is of the hive mind; following directly the word of the monolith. He operates beyond the limited reasoning of the human condition. He torturously forced the astronaut/s to move beyond their limits, finding new dimensions and grasping for new understandings of reality just as the apes were cruelly forced to find the use of tools in the beginning which led to the present time of 1968. All under the order of the monolith.

[stevestrickland]

Consulting other AIs sounds like what the Minds (massively intelligent AIs) that occupy ships in the Culture books do. And their names (e.g., Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence, Flexible Demeanour, Just Read The Instructions) are much more fun than Hal, plus the source of some of Elon Musk's names for his autonomous spaceport drone ships.

[Nicholasvelaz]

I think that HAL 9000 is the most human character in 2001. All of the humans in the movie are seemingly almost more robotic than HAL was.