HAL 9000 (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) Explained

open the pod bay doors please help hello hell do you read me hello hell do you read me do you read me help do you read me help affirmative death I read you open the pod bay doors hell I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that hey guys what's happening niet here with film comics explained and today we'll be taking a look at HAL 9000 as featured in Stanley Kubrick's mind-bending 2001 Space Odyssey the heuristic we programmed algorithmic computer 9000 or HAL 9000 more commonly referred to as hal was essentially the main antagonist and arthur c clarke space odyssey series the first part of which had been adapted to screen by Stanley Kubrick who I believe is one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century voiced by the late Douglas rain who sadly passed away at the age of 90 last year Al's consistently calm demeanor was a representation of the amoral emptiness of outer space the juxtapositioning of his homicidal actions with a smooth matter-of-fact explanations creates this unsettling feeling of helplessness as Dave goes head-to-head with the most advanced piece of technology ever created one of the most disconcerting aspects of hal was that although he was a computer we could see character traits and even a semblance of a personality from the onset of his introduction with even his interviewer stating that hal appeared to have a sense of pride in his work and operational history in talking to the computer one gets the sense that he is capable of emotional responses do you believe that how has genuine emotions well he acts like he has genuine emotions of course he's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him in the film by Kubrick the book it's based upon and even its sequels hal is essentially an artificial intelligence unit and the on-board computer of the discovery one in addition to maintaining all systems on the discovery Hal who is considered to be the most advanced computer to date was also capable of numerous other functions including speech facial and speech recognition interpreting emotions as well as mimicking them however as the film unfolded we came to realize that upon gaining sentience Howe was no mimicking emotions and was instead reacting instinctively something he had not been programmed to do house capabilities like that of all the technology seen in 2001 was based on the speculation of respected scientists at the time in the mid 1960s many computer scientists in the field of artificial intelligence were optimistic that machines with house capabilities would exist within a few decades and to ensure that they could make the film believable Kubrick had Marvin Minsky who was a director of the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory and one of the most influential researchers in the field as an adviser who's present during filming one thing that preoccupied me a little bit is the question of why do things exist and I think the answer is that that's an extra hypothesis that doesn't make any sense so to say that the universe exists is silly because it's saying the universe is one of the things in the universe so there's something wrong with that idea in the film it's explained that hal became operational on the 12th of january 1992 at the Hal laboratories in her Berner Illinois as production number three the activation year was 1991 in earlier screenplays and changed to 1997 in Clarke's novel which was written and released in conjunction with the movie in 1968 I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail it should then be a simple matter to track down the cause part of house hardware is shown towards the end of the film but for the most part is depicted as a camera lens containing a red dot which had been placed on numerous locations onboard the ship in 2001 a Space Odyssey Hal is initially considered a dependable member of the crew maintaining ship functions and engaging jeanne ly with its human crew members on an equal footing as seen with this chess game against Dave however as time progresses how begins to malfunction in subtle ways and as a result the decision is made to shut him down in order to prevent more serious malfunctions now the sequence of events end manner in which Hal is shut down difference between the novel and film for example in the aforementioned game of chess Hal makes minor and undetected mistakes in his analysis foreshadowing his more severe malfunctions later in the film in the story astronauts David Bowman and Frank Paul consider disconnecting house cognitive circuits when he appears to be mistaken and reporting the presence of a faults in the spacecraft's community and antennae faced with the prospect of disconnection how them decides to kill the astronauts in order to protect and continue its program directives while Howells motivations are ambiguous in the film the novel explains that the computer was unable to resolve a conflict between his general mission to relay information accurately and order specific to the mission requiring that he withhold from Berman and Paul the true purpose of the mission this withholding is considered essential after the findings of a psychological experiment called Project Barsoom where humans were made to believe that they had been in contact with an alien race in every person tested a deep-seated xenophobia was revealed which was unknowingly replicated in house constructed personality now Mission Control essentially didn't want the crew discovery to have their thinking compromised by the knowledge that alien contact had already occurred it's for this reason that how decides to kill the crew which ensured that he carried out his mission without lying to them how do you have an enormous responsibility on this mission in many ways perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single mission element in the film how central core is depicted as a crawl space full of brightly lit computer modules mounted and arrays from which they could be inserted or removed Berman shots down held by removing modules from service one by one and as he does so house consciousness slowly begins to degrade when house logic is completely gone he begins to sing the song daisy bell' interestingly this was actually the first piece of music sung by a computer in real life which Clarke had earlier observed that a text-to-speech demonstration in 1961 of the IBM 7:09 for [Music] Hal's final act of any significance is to prematurely play a pre-recorded message from Mission Control which reveals the true reasons for the mission to Jupiter which was that eighteen months prior the first evidence of intelligent life in the form of a monolith was discovered buried 40 feet beneath the lunar surface of Titan and although its origin and purpose was a mystery what they did know was that it was beaming a transmission directly to Jupiter which is why they'd been sent to investigate in the preceding novel 2010 Odyssey to Pallas restarted Bay's creator dr. Chandra who discovers that house crisis was caused by a programming contradiction as how was created for the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment yet his orders from the council required him to keep everything a secret creating a hofstadter Mobius loop what's more hell even sacrifices himself to enable the astronauts to escape the safety and at the moment of his destruction the monolith makers transform howl into a noncorporeal being like David had become at the end of 2001 we started in 1965 early 1965 well I became interested in the idea that the universe was full of intelligent civilizations which is a current scientific belief scientists know now that there are about a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and about a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe point is that there are so many stars in the universe that the likelihood of life evolving around them even if there were possibilities of one in a million there would be hundreds of millions of worlds in the universe looking back at the film's while I initially saw Hal as the antagonist I find it hard to label him as such the reason for this is because as I've mentioned earlier he'd been given to mission parameters by Mission Control they came into conflict leading to his cold precise an actually logical decision to end the lives of the crew members to ensure the success of the mission at all costs in saying that I'm also willing to accept that his own fear of death via terminal disconnection coupled with his desire to see the mission through was Peron his decision-making I mean in the film he mentions that it was improbable for him to make a mistake while human error was commonplace and this might be an indication that he no longer saw himself as a machine I feel much better now I really do I'm afraid I'm afraid well that's all for today folks big thanks to all of you guys a requested we take a closer look at Hal as featured in the mesmerizingly hypnotic 2001 a Space Odyssey don't forget to hit subscribe and click the notification icon to stay up to date on all my content and if there's anything else you'd like to request please don't hesitate to ask as always it's been a pleasure knee and here with film comics explained thanks for stopping by early days of this thing called artificial intelligence we started to try to make programs that would do very advanced things maybe that was a mistake the sixth member of the discovery crew was not concerned about the problems of hibernation for he was the latest result in machine intelligence the HAL 9000 computer we next spoke with the HAL 9000 computer whom we learned one addresses as hell good afternoon how how's everything going good afternoon mr. Raymer everything is going extremely well how despite your enormous intellect are you ever frustrated by your dependence on people to carry out that not in the slightest bit I enjoy working with people [Music] you

Channel: FilmComicsExplained

Views: 410,526

Keywords: HAL 9000, 2001 a space odyssey, stanley kubrick

Id: V2O-b-4NqP0

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2019