2001: Stanley Kubrick's Technological Prediction for Our World

The longer passage on the lower left is excerpted from The Shallows, when Carr mentions his first experience watching the shocking scene at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the movie came up again in my SAT book (passage pictured on upper right), I decided I should watch it and see just how much it related to our class discussion of technology.

While watching the film I picked up on a couple moments that directly tied into the class discussion of technology and consumerism. Shortly after 2001 started, names like "Hilton Space Station" and "Howard Johnson Light Room" began to appear all around the space center. Kubrick certainly captured the essence of the "branding of our society" and incorporated it into his prediction for our modern world. About the time this flood of company names appears around the space center a father contacts his young daughter in a manner quite similar to our modern system of video chatting. After apologizing for not being able to make her birthday, the father asks what she would like as a present and receives the response " a telephone". This child couldn't have been more than 5 or 6, but it made me think that this request is probably not uncommon among children in our society who are currently this age. 2001 also triggers the question: are we overly trusting of our technology? The film depicts an extreme example of computers literally robbing humans of their control over their own affairs, yet it is still frightening to think of how often we fail to doubt our technology. Perhaps it could be beneficial to question our technology more so than we currently do, as the scene Carr describes at the closing of The Shallows evidences how a main character in 2001, Dave, is influenced by the pleading of the super-computer HAL. When HAL begins crying out in fear, Dave stalls for a moment and ponders whether he should continue the destruction of this computer-gone-bad.

Here is a link to the trailer for 2001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vahx4rAd0N0.

If your interested to see the connections between the film and what we've been discussing in class check it out, but I'm warning you it can be quite slow at various points.