2001: A Space Odyssey

Dec 07, 2025

Until timestamp of 1 hr 42 mins, I simply observed the marvel of human imagination in it’s glory that this movie is. 1:42 is the sequence where HAL the AI has gone rogue, one astronaut is dead. Another has to brute force his way through the space station and access AI’s memory. Probably to look at the logs and reset it . Seems, one of the context windows needed to be reset. This had me thinking, as a slightly AI aware individual in the post LLM outburst era. This is still awfully advanced AGI stuff that technology has not yet reached. But the way I see it is, given the advanced state of AI, execution and thinking about trivial things is not for humans anymore. But the astronauts need access to the eval functions of the LLM to set guardrails. And the emotion bit is a great touch. I wonder if it would’ve been possible for the astronaut to penetrate and change AI’s opinion from the pod. He'd have to use a different set of commands to modify AI’s context without having to access the evals. That’s certainly possible today. In fact, it is already happening. This has a lot to do with the current architecture of LLMs but it is still very nascent. It will only improve more with more data and applications so jailbreaking is not as easy.

I see 2 aspects of science being fictionized and depicted exceptionally well in this movie, space and tech. Exceptional because it’d have been very hard and tedious to get the graphics right. And this dates back both hubble and portable computers! To have the theoretical understanding, imagination and execution with the tech of that time, is an achievement.

For the space aspect, what are the radioactive bricks supposed to be? Gateways of wormholes connecting space-time continuum? How’d they get there? Are they put there by a higher form of being? If so, who? Humans or any other species? If humans, This movie could be a predecessor of Interstellar and boy have they both done a stellar job! Also, by this logic, space tech will be the natural progression post mass adoption of AI? The grounds of progression I can foresee are: compute, space, biology - in this order. Will all of it happen in my lifetime? Honestly, I hope so! If not, I hope I get to see commercialised space travels atleast. And if I do, man what a time to be alive would that be!

On a different note, a lot of pop sci-fi has a very distorted idea of what a post AI world would be like. Now, I can safely say that they seem to be oversimplification of a phenomenon. It won’t alter the course of human history completely. Because, taking reference from this movie, even with the best intentions and most capabilities, AI is not powerful enough to “take over”. Honestly, I don't think it ever will. In that sense, I believe AI is like a weapon, wielder holds the power. AI and humanity will largely co-exist in a very symbiotic manner (insert red pill, blue pill meme from matrix). But it’ll propel us for sure - both for good and bad, be careful what you wish for.

The only thing is I found the movie to be very slow. Kept switching between playback speed of 1x and 1.5x.