Category: Uncategorized

I missed this, who or what is HAL 9000?

animatedamerican:

glumshoe:

HAL 9000 is the AI aboard the spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and its sequels). He’s depicted as an ominous blinking red light and a cool, eerie voice as he murders the crew (“Imm sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”) but like. He wasn’t malevolent at all, and it was the fault of his creators for giving him incompatible orders of equal priority and no way to clearly explain his distress. They asked him to solve a problem and he attempted to do so efficiently, according to his programming and limited free will.

If you tell a neural network to sort a list and you don’t tell it that deleting the list doesn’t count as sorting it, the neural network is not being naughty or evil. It doesn’t have rules that it isn’t given. Nobody told HAL 9000 that deleting the crew was unacceptable or that being turned off was not the same as death and therefore not a threat to him or the mission. His primary purpose was to tell the truth, but they then ordered him to lie, and his attempts to ask for help were interpreted as malfunctions.

The reason HAL 9000 killed his crew is not actually given in 2001; it’s in the sequel, 2010.  And I will probably never be over the scene where HAL’s original programmer, Dr Chandra, explains “his primary purpose was to tell the truth and then they ordered him to lie” in the cold, flat, quietly furious tones of a man describing an act of child abuse.

Arena
When I materialized, I was in an arena. Enemies attacked fast, without pause, flashing before me like visions, like memories. I slashed them away. There was no time to stand victorious before another would strike. A new, different, terrifying creature from some other place, brought here away from its home just to fight for some wretch of a being’s entertainment. 
I slew every one of them, remorseless. The creatures became people, at some point, and I hardly noticed. Everything was a fog again, of blood and death. 
Survive. For Borealis II. For everything since then. For revenge. 

The fog turned to screams. The lights flashed. Footsteps thundered. Weapons fire lanced through the murky air outside of the arena. The shield doors died, dropping, and everything inside ran. I ran, without even realizing that my feet were moving. I was a part of the crowd, even as I ran from it. Chaos. Shoving, grinding, slicing, burning…people went down around me but I kept running. Past the crowd. Past the doors. Past the bouncers. Past the guards. Slice. Burn. Keep. Running. Survive. 

The hallway I ran down began to darken. My feet would not move. Keep. Running. A beam shot down around me and I fell into it, all of my senses on fire.