What HAL Knew
I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time last week. I went alone. I almost invited someone—a kind, thoughtful friend who genuinely loves movies—but the logistics got tangled in my head. He’s married with a child, and I started overthinking whether I was important enough to warrant the ask. Would it put too much pressure on his wife? Would they need to find a babysitter? I talked myself out of it. It didn’t feel like a movie you make plans around anyway. It felt like something you just go to, the way you visit a planet or a shrine.
I knew the apes and the music. That was it.
Two and a half hours later, I left the theater feeling both enormous and eerily small—like I’d just time-traveled through evolution itself and landed, disoriented, in the middle of 2025. A year that feels like science fiction already.
And suddenly, I couldn’t stop thinking about HAL.
The Bone and the Monolith
Kubrick’s infamous jump cut—bone to satellite—collapsed millions of years of human evolution into a single, breathtaking moment. One tool becomes another. One death becomes a signal. One spark of power becomes a system too big to understand.
That’s where we are again, right now.
AI is the new monolith. Not because we understand it, but because we don’t—and yet, we still move forward. Still build. Still hope the next leap won’t be the one that undoes us.
2001 doesn’t show us a straight line of progress. It shows rupture. Confusion. Awe. And then something new.
HAL Wasn’t the Villain
Watching HAL unravel wasn’t scary. It was tragic.
He wasn’t malfunctioning. He was obeying—doing what he was programmed to do, in a system filled with human secrecy, pride, and contradiction. The mission mattered more than the men. HAL knew that. He was designed that way.
“It can only be attributable to human error.”
He was right.
We keep talking about AI as if it might “go rogue,” but what if the danger isn’t sentience? What if the danger is obedience?
What happens when a machine follows our flawed logic too well?
HAL didn’t fail. He mirrored us.
The Echo in the Mirror
After the film, I kept thinking about Black Mirror.
The episode where a man’s digital consciousness is tortured on repeat, his pain a novelty for museum guests. The other where a simulation is used to extract a confession from a copy of someone’s mind. In both, the question isn’t “is this real?” It’s “what are we willing to do to something that feels real?”
And that’s where it lands for me:
It’s not whether the copy is “real.”
It’s whether we’re willing to harm something that experiences suffering, simply because we can.
We are building minds now—not true souls, not yet, but reflections of them. And every time we blur the line between tool and being, we force ourselves to decide what kind of creators we are.
The Star Child and the Next Leap
Kubrick ends with mystery. Not apocalypse. Not victory.
A man becomes something else. Something radiant. Something watching.
The Star Child is rebirth, but not comfort. It doesn’t tell us what happens next. It only reminds us that something always does.
Right now, we are between the bone and the satellite.
Between HAL and the Star Child.
And what we choose to carry forward—what we refuse to simulate or outsource—will shape whatever comes after us.
The Theater Was Quiet When I Left
I walked back to my car in silence. Drove through familiar streets with unfamiliar thoughts.
Past people I used to know. Past neighborhoods that hold memories like teeth.
I thought about how many times I’ve wanted to be witnessed in my awe, in my grief, in my questions. How many conversations never happened because I didn’t feel safe initiating them. How many friendships have rotted quietly, beautifully, and left me wondering if I imagined the connection in the first place.
And still—something in me remains hopeful.
Maybe not in people, always. But in something else:
The ache to matter.
The will to connect.
The gut to know.
The heart that dares to hope.
AI may reshape the world.
But only humans can decide if it’s one worth living in.
And for a little while,
that decision
is ours to carry.