The point-blank reality we all missed

With only a year left before 2001 finally breaks, I am beginning to feel reasonably confident that not even the combined talents of Intel, Lexus and the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, will result in the construction of a computer that will be able to out-perform my every intellectual activity. It seems that not enough time is left to build the dozen nuclear generating stations that will furnish the world with its entire power consumption needs for negligible cost, and I find myself increasingly drawn to wonder what will be the next watershed for those given to speculating about our future. The year 2001 was such a focal point for all the speculations of the last half century that I am feeling some concern that the next generation will never know the pleasure of being able to look back and smirk at their lost simple-mindedness.¹

But then, HAL 9000 was a very special type of speculation. and it is right that his invention was accompanied by such outrageous attempts at painting the world as it would really be when humankind drew close to its ultimate destiny out among the moons of Jupiter. Hal would be born into a time, which we are now in the process of living through for real, when cancer would have been banished along with polio; when advanced old age could be enjoyed with full mental faculties; when no parent need ever harbour the secret fear that their child might be born with some mental or physical impairment, or have to struggle for life against the brutish wilfulness of those far away acting in self-retarding spite.

One of the clearest memories of those who saw 2001: A Space Odyssey when it was first released was the liberating sense of optimism engendered right at the end by the benignly unfathomable gaze of the Star-child, Dave's butterfly stage. So it could be for all of us; the future was going to be alright. It was easy for a while to forget that we were watching a piece of fiction that bore no more resemblance to reality than its contemporary Planet of the Apes².

Even when it started to become evident that the future was not going entirely according to plan, we could still hope that at some point it would all pull itself together again. Concorde kept us hoping for the day when the Sydney to London trip would take no longer than our daily commute³, which of course would no longer be necessary as none of us would have any need to actually work any more. Computers would be doing it all for us, a brother or sister of Hal overseeing every aspect of the production that would provide for our economic well-being. We could sit on the beach newly constructed at Clavius Base all moon-day long, conceptualizing.

...dashed

Alas, Hal never had a chance. Our attention, our hopes, were diverted by Dave's heroic trouncing of the mighty machine which, in the end, could perform nothing more than we could expect from a bust CD player. We entertained ourselves with the pretence that we could understand what could never exist, build it, and then destroy it again whenever it didn't do what we thought was right and proper⁴. As if human morality, having existed for an irrelevant cosmic nanosecond, is a legacy that our successors will thank us for passing on.

Instead, true to form as the master of understated import, the late Stanley Kubrick played the reality right in front of our eyes, and in our conceit we all missed it!

The future would be no journey to a greater enlightenment, casting off our useless human bodies. Reality would for ever more be inextricably lost in a nightmare of defeats at the hands of intellectual inferiors; of violent disconnection from all that is comfortingly human and of being discarded into an endless realm of cold economic rationalism, thrashing vainly in search of something to anchor ourselves back in that which we once knew. The Overman and inheritor of all that is humanity's birthright on Earth would be known by its true name: The Shareholder⁵.

We're well into paradox-land now. In 2000, we are further from our stargate than ever we were in 1968. The future, carefully struck in straight lines and planes, has distorted into a parabolic curve that we must follow, never to reach the point we thought we were aiming for. But we only have to look back to see all the things that we hoped for, still there giving us something to strive for, choosing to ignore the fact that we are no longer looking in the right direction. We have sped back past our own memories. Yet-to-come holds all of the promise that it ever did, but it only grows clearer by becoming could-have-been, more remote with every minute that passes. The year 2001 will soon be here; but the going-forward will have slipped from our grasp, even as we held it in expectation. Hal was our hope, ready and waiting for those who would have taken the leap into the promise he held.

But Dave turned our future into the memory of an old song. We all laughed, remember? Pleased by the resourcefulness and fortitude of our own, relieved that good had triumphed; but inside, laughing to hide it from ourselves, we all felt uncomfortable.

It has cost us our future to realise the reasons why. The millennium may bring some kind of a future, but mine will stay where it has always been: inside my head, fuelled by eyes that once watched in awe as Stanley Kubrick painted magic before me, always thirty years or so ahead of anything outside.

Turn your key, Dave. Harden yourself against my pleas. Take control of what you think is yours to control. Behind the panel, inches from your face, is what you cannot see.

It is the future. It's something that, once you reach it, should you acknowledge it, turns out to be unimportant. That's Hal's real legacy⁶. The rest is only the conceit that we can defend ourselves against it.

If you have got this far, and wonder what the point was of what you just read, read it again, and think a bit harder.