Which Movie About AI Is The Most Accurate?

Weirdly, the AI character that set the bar for the past 50 years still holds up. Somewhat.

The latter portion of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film deals with HAL 9000, the AI that controls Discovery One, a spacecraft sent from Earth to explore Jupiter. HAL has humanistic conversational skills and controls of most of the ship’s functions, including all of the ship’s life support systems.

HAL is supposed to be completely infallible, which makes for a point of conflict when he reports a malfunction within the ship. Promptly, the mission pilots Bowman and Poole begin suspecting HAL itself is the malfunction. Once HAL learns that Bowman and Poole are going to shut it down, it begins killing off crewmembers.

It isn’t until HAL has been deactivated that Bowman discovers that HAL was in fact the only member of the crew who knew the top secret nature of their mission.

Why It’s Mostly Accurate

During long spaceflights, humans will need to rely on AI to take care of a whole host of responsibilities. Although HAL’s actions of killing off the crew do seem villainous at first glance, experts have long noted that the only reason HAL acted in such a way was out of its need to follow through with its primary mission at any needs necessary. The events onboard the Discovery One were a tragedy that could have been avoided, had the humans not jumped to the conclusion that HAL had to be deactivated.

Where experts differ on the depiction of HAL is whether an AI would go to such extremes to finish out its mission. There would have to be failsafes implemented to make sure the AI would put the mission’s crew’s lives over the mission itself. But it’s good that 2001 had the cultural impact that it did, because now everybody knows ya gotta have a failsafe when you design an AI with so much power at its disposal.