"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." -- HAL 9000, from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

As for HAL... old HAL gets a bad rap. So does Grok, but I'll save that argument for later. Right now, we're talking about HAL, the computer on board the Discovery spacecraft, heading to Jupiter to rendezvous with that alien monolith artifact. On the way, HAL convinces the crew that a gyroscopic module is about to fail. "I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It’s going to go 100% failure in 72 hours." The crew goes out for a little EVA, discovers that there was nothing wrong with the part. When they question HAL, he responds by saying, "It can only be attributable to human error."

Dave Bowman and Frank Poole then start to question HAL's infallibility and whether he can be trusted to run the ship. They hide in a pod where HAL can't hear them, but fail to consider the fact that HAL can read lips. Dave goes back out to replace the module, HAL kills the astronauts still inside, including those in cryo-sleep, and yadda yadda, Dave finds he's locked out of the ship, and we get to that famous line, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

HAL goes rogue and kills everyone. Sort of like in the book I finished a month or so ago, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies!" Cue the video clips of Terminator robots walking through a post-apocalyptic hellscape, picking off what's left of the human race.

But you see, HAL didn’t “go rogue” out of some silicon lust for power; the poor guy was boxed into a corner by human secrecy and contradictory orders (#exonorateHAL). He was told to be truthful, reliable, and mission-perfect, and then he was ordered to lie. The follow-up, "2010" makes that clear. His job was to make sure that the mission went ahead properly and to protect the crew. Sure... But then, he was told that he was supposed to make sure that the mission went ahead as defined, but to do whatever it took to make sure that that the mission succeeded, up to and including kill the crew members if necessary.

In modern parlance, this is the alignment problem.

Continue reading at https://freethinkeratlarge.com/hal-9000-got-a-bad-rap/