I give myself credit for being significantly ahead of my time. I first came across artificial intelligence (AI) in 1968 when I was just 24 years old and, from the beginning, I sensed its deep dangers. Imagine that.
Much as I’d like to brag about it, though, I was anything but alone. I was, in fact, undoubtedly one of millions of people who saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick from a script written with Arthur C. Clarke (inspired by a short story, “The Sentinel,” that famed science-fiction writer Clarke had produced in — yes! — 1948). AI then had an actual name, HAL 9,000 (but call “him” Hal).
And no, the first imagined AI in my world did not act well, which should have been (but didn’t prove to be) a lesson for us all. Embedded in a spaceship heading for Jupiter, he killed four of the five astronauts on it and did his best to do in the last of them before being shut down.
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