I was eighteen years old at the time....and accompanied my older scholar friend to the theater to watch Stanley Kubrick's....2001 A Space Odyssey. I do not recall being all that thrilled....although my friend was. Well he was more prescient than I....for the epic film would be a box office hit if it were only first introduced today. As for my friend....he was a professor his whole life at a major university....and eventually became a Christian.
The plot? Well there is a monolith that is spotted on a planet in space. What is it? Star Trek was just beginning its second season when the Kubrick film came out....and an 'Enterprise' type of spacecraft is sent to investigate. There is a computer that runs the ship....and interacts with the crew. OK....I am not going to give spoilers here....but everything is OK until the computer makes a mistake. If it did indeed make a mistake then the crew would have to disable it....for it was never known to make mistakes....and mistakes could be fatal. Now the computer....the AI aspect of it....insists that it did not make a mistake....that it was human error. OK....that's it. I couldn't explain the ending even if I wanted to....and I don't think that Kubrick could explain it.....but Arthur C. Clarke....the author of the book that the film was based on had aliens and god and all kinds of other things in mind.Well back to real life....there have been literally hundreds of scientists make the effort to come out to express grave concern over the potential catastrophe of AI. This is not dissimilar to the invention of the atomic bomb. The potential was there....there were benefits that could be had....and there was no one to stop it. It is the same with drone technology. I would have to look it up.....it was quite a few years back....but I was concerned that these cute little flying devices would some day carry weapons.
They literally laughed at the fundamentalists back in the early 70s as they warned about computers and chips of some kind on the hand....and a new world order. The Christians of course were right because they were merely repeating what God's Word was telling us.
Artificial Intelligence....AI....is a vacuum ready to be filled....if it hasn't already started. It is perceived to be a money-maker....and that my friends is a hard thing to stop.
Note: My original plan was to reserve seats on the first day to see the new film coming out....Oppenheimer....which deals with the issue of atomic warfare....but in researching it as the reviews are just starting to appear....the R rating is more than problematic....and I need more information. I instead ordered the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning....(biography)....American Prometheus....from which the film is based. We are becoming aware of the dystopia that we are creating whether it be nuclear war or AI or experimentation in human genetics or any one of a number of other things....but we never bring God into the equation. Once again God lets us know of these things in advance. Read the twelfth and concluding chapter of Daniel if you wish....but consider particularly verse 4....
"But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until....('until' being a key word)....the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase."
