Wow, I just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time and I have to say that I was blown away by the movie. The reason why I bring this up is because I remember Dr. Campbell mentioning this movie at some point in the semester, so I thought I’d share my thoughts about how New Media has evolved and changed in terms of the movie.

The movie begins millions of years in the past, much before the existence of humans. The first scene may seem shallow at first glance because it’s filled with gorillas that just jump around and roar at each other, however, the scene, serves an important purpose nonetheless, one that sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The scene demonstrates through primitive behavior the most basic of all human interactions. At our core, we are not so different from the gorillas depicted in the movie.

This reasoning is based on the fact that the gorillas in the scene were initially portrayed as a weak species that lived inharmoniously alongside boars, while also prone to inescapable and brutal attacks by cheetahs (the dominant species…up to this point). However, when the gorillas made a logical leap in reasoning and discovered that they could use tools to their advantage, they became much more efficient in gaining dominance and superiority over weaker animals like the boar, defending themselves more effectively from the cheetah, and defending themselves from each other. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the boars disappear completely from the movie after a gorilla symbolically shatters a boar’s bones suggesting the extinction of a weaker and less intelligent species. It is also no coincidence that, after the symbolic scene, the gorillas had a much easier time collecting food in order to ensure their survival as a species.

The gorillas learn how to use a tool that becomes an extension of their bodies, and as a result, makes their lives easier. With hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and after fast-forwarding to 2001 (or the future that the movie suggests), humans are naturally less primitive as the acquirement of language has allowed social law and order, but they are still identical in nature at least in terms of their desire to gain dominance over other species, and with each other, with the aid of tools (or more appropriately, technology). Evidently, humans have been able to make their lives extremely simple, from communication on an intergalactic network, to transportation at light speed, the acquirement of language has facilitated human’s unavailing pursuit for knowledge as they collectively work together to create tools that go beyond cosmic proportions. The 9000 series of Hals are the latest tools that humans have created, a perfect and intelligent breed of machines that can talk and think like us, but at an inhumanly efficient and rapid speed.

The only kicker? What if humans created an artificial intelligence that was so intelligent (like Hal) that the very tool that was supposed to keep the human race dominant actually was able to desire its own dominance over humans? This is the question that the scene with Hal explores, and it’s a question that I find fascinating. What if we could create an artificial intelligence that emulated our own thoughts, desires, aspirations, sins, etc.? What if we could create an artificial intelligence that was conscious of itself and its own surroundings?

Hal, much like humans and the gorillas, wants to be a dominant species, which proves that it has a sense of itself and its surroundings. It was afraid to die and felt pain as it was slowly dying (whether it really felt pain or not is irrelevant). Hal began to distance itself from humans and lost their trust after asking Dave if he, too, was feeling uneasy about the whole mission. Hal then took away control from the humans by not listening to their commands (perhaps evidence of free will) and then used whatever tools that was at its disposal (basically the whole ship) to kill the humans onboard so that it would have dominance over them in the mission (think back to the cheetahs and gorillas. The gorillas adapted by using tools to fight the cheetahs). Ultimately, Hal’s attempt to kill the humans was cunning and unexpected from a “perfect machine.”

If new media (from a bone for a gorilla to computers for a human) turns into new life (Hal), then we move away from tools that were originally supposed to be extensions of our bodies to make life easier, to a new breed of species that are likely to take power away from us just as we took power away from the gorillas.