Evolution and Artificial Intelligence in Control
A movie back in 1968 that was based on a book by Arthur C. Clarke which asked the question about evolution and artificial intelligence (AI) being given too much control and hence taking control? It has been a while since I last saw this, and I should watch it again as I suspect that I will have forgotten quite a bit.
The movie is broken into a number of parts, the first starts at the beginning of man's presence on the planet. Early man finds a monolith which doesn't belong in the local environment or probably any "Earthly" environment. After this encounter man creates the first weapon, we have evolved.
Fast forward a few hundred thousand years or so and we have a a manned spaceship orbiting Earth, and travelling to the moon. Guess what is found on the moon? Another monolith, the result of this encounter seems to be a trip to Jupiter about 18 months later, hmmm.
We now have two astronauts awake and running the spaceship with a computer named HAL 9000. The computer basically runs the entire ship with some input every so often from the awake humans. We also have three humans in a hibernation type state.
Everything is going according to plan until HAL has a glitch, a computer having a glitch, who would have thought? Or does it know something it doesn't want to share? Seems the designers of the spaceship forgot about having manual overrides, backups or fail safes as HAL now must erase all evidence of the glitch. This includes erasing the humans, oops.
After the sole surviving human is free from HAL he learns of the message "Jupiter and beyond the Infinite". So it seems that the monoliths are markers for evolution and if you make it to Jupiter the next big evolutionary jump is in store.
Considering that was made in the late 60's it did push the boundaries with special effects, soundtrack, visuals, and even length of the movie. In many ways it was ahead of its time and should be on people's list of movies to see.