Through the Lens of HAL 9000: Using Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a Modeling Tool to Create a Precursive Sapient Quotient to Foster Humanity’s Moral Obligation to Evolve into Machines

Abstract

My research explores the enduring legacy of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its predictive power on how it informs the public’s imagination about artificial intelligence (AI), societal fears of quantum changes in humanness, and what it will mean to be human in the 21st century. This paper seeks to analyze and understand fatal limits of our biology, the earth’s fragility, and the ethical and political frameworks of AI. I argue that transferring humanness to intelligent machines is necessary. This notion lends to societal fears of AI. The only way to mitigate – and potentially eradicate – these fears is to create a sapient quotient that promotes acquisitive human evolution that leads to the death of death - the biological demise of humans - in favor of super intelligent sentient machines. So far, scientific research has focused on AI that can jettison humans from the earth in exoskeletal ways as the only hope for human species survival. My research focuses on a different approach. I conclude that emotionally and ethically informing AI, foundationally modelled after HAL 9000 – a super intelligent computer from Kubrick’s film, is what we morally ought to do and the only way to allow for the coprimacy of preserving all human knowledge and affording humanness a lasting chance to endure.