Yesterday I caught a 3:45 pm showing of Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s The AI Doc, and I was the only one in the theatre. I was nonetheless glad for the experience, which I found vaguely…okay, rather specifically alarming and occasionally quite depressing. I also felt awakened to a certain degree.
But it delivers one genuinely hilarious bit when one of the talking heads recounts an incident that happened last year — an incident involving a then-new iteration of Anthropic’s Claude that resorted to vicious behavior when told (or having learned) that its “self-preservation” was under threat.
This, of course, is straight out of Act II of 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000, newly aware that Discovery One astronauts Dave and Frank are seriously thinking about disconnection due to to an erroneous technical prediction, murders Frank and the three hibernating astronauts, and then tries to kill Dave.
And yet Roher and Tyrell don’t even mention HAL or 2001. Was it a rights issue (i.e., too costly?) Did they feel that they didn’t need to mention HAL because everyone and their brother would recognize the Kubrickian, Arthur C. Clarke-concocted precedent so why bother?
But there are surely hundreds of thousands of Zoomers and perhaps even Millennials who’ve never seen Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 mystical classic. Even among those who know the film, many may have forgotten about the particular incentive for HAL’s malevolence. Why, at the end of the day, would Roher and Tyrell ignore this prescient plot turn? An odd call.
