2001: A Space Odyssey

Artificial intelligence plays a prominent role in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The sixth member of Discovery’s crew, and the only one not in hibernation who knows what the mission really entails, is the ship’s computer. In a novel in which the development of human intelligence is so central, this parallel but distinct technological and evolutionary process takes on particular significance.

Relatively early in the novel, Clarke establishes that the development of artificial intelligence is a source of human anxiety. Computers have developed through stages at “intervals of twenty years, and the thought that another one was now imminent already worried a great many people” (86). At the time Part 2 takes place, the line between human and artificial intelligence is increasingly blurred: “[A]rtificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of the human brain” (86). “Some philosophers” prefer the word “mimic” to “reproduce” when describing artificial intelligence’s ability to undertake “most of the activities of the human brain” (86). Presumably, this anxiety stems partly from fears of what an artificially intelligent being might do to those it ostensibly “serves.” However, the semantic hairsplitting suggests less practical concerns, such as a fear that artificial intelligence undercuts human uniqueness or even the idea of the soul.