“2001: A Space Odyssey” revisited in 2023

Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the introduction of artificial intelligence with its ominous 1968 prophecy, have captured again the attention of current analysts of AI, and especially the matter of thought control and decision-making by robotic machines. These concerned analysts point toward unintended and undesired possible consequences for present and future applications. Many of those results are already occurring and exerting harm broadly through social media, they assert. Even more so than George Orwell’s “1984,” In 1968, Kubrick’s film prefigured a future now at our doorstep, these analysts interpret and notify their audiences.

My personal interest as a Christian theologian and columnist in the subject precedes this current interest with my students, and my own, look at artificial intelligence, and principally at its theological significance, in a course I offered at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond in the 1990s. A later film than Kubrick’s which we saw then, entitled “AI,” was included in our exploration and study, along with early published essays on the subject.

Why were my seminary students and I interested in artificial intelligence? One of our central questions had to do with how artificial intelligence would change what it means to be human. And most of all, we asked, where did God fit in? My students and I did not know the language of “algorithmic technology.” Still, we were equipped with insights and language of sacred scripture, and we were familiar with the abstract thought and language of metaphysics. Further, we were informed by much of humanity’s classical and most rigorous teaching and were thereby adequately prepared to undertake our investigation.

Max Fisher, author of “The Chaos Machine,” (Little, Brown, and Co., 2022), subtitled “The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World,” ends his investigative work ( closely researched and footnoted with 337 notes) with a probing and disturbing, commentary on AI and on Kubrick’s revelatory film. He writes:

“The more I spoke with psychologists and network analysts, regulators and reformed engineers, the more that the terms they used to describe this technology kept reminding me of HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Kubrick film. In the film, HAL, though responsible for the crew’s safety, overinterprets [misinterprets, that is] programming instructing it to insure arrival at their preplanned destination no matter what, and attempts to kill everyone aboard the ship. HAL is not meant to be a villain. If there was one, it was the engineers who, in their hubris, assumed their creation’s actions would be as benevolent as their intentions, or perhaps the astronauts who entrusted themselves to a machine possessing the power of life and death, with incentives that might diverge from their own. The lesson of “2001” was hardly to upgrade HAL, with further algorithmic tweaks, in the hopes that next time, it might behave a little more responsibly. Nor was it that HAL’s engineers should say they were sorry and promised to do better. And it certainly wasn’t that HAL’s corporate maker should take on greater and greater control of their customers’ lives while lawmakers and journalists mused on the robot’s nature. The lesson was unambiguous: shut HAL off. Even if it meant losing whatever benefits HAL brought. Even if it was difficult, in the film’s final scenes, to rip HAL’s tentacles from the systems governing every facet of the astronauts’ lives. Even if the machine fought back with all its power.”

Fisher concludes his book with sarcasm only thinly masked, about where we are headed. Artificial intelligence already programs more of our daily lives than we recognize. Most of that dominance lies outside our arena of choices. My students and I saw, if only vaguely, the challenge of that power. As the Kubrick movie depicts, and warned, more than a half-century ago, robotic decision-making by machines opens Pandora’s box we might wish to have kept closed.

Chief among my concerns which I express here, is AI’s innovators’ hubris and arrogance, their ignorance and absence of interest in, and inability to undertake, humankind’s transcendent quest for metaphysical truth. They hold the unintelligible and idiosyncratic assumption that they, at last, know the essence of things in an algorithmic “metaverse,” so-dubbed.

The venerable quest for metaphysical truth of the nature of being itself is absent in modern discussions of algorithms and computers. And it is lacking, as well, in otherwise serious studies like Fisher’s. Kubrick’s film, I rediscovered, as I watched it again, shadowed the subject of ontology and ultimacy, of metaphysics and transcendence, but only obscurely, leaving that heavy lifting, perhaps, for seminary students and their teachers to undertake. Smile.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ontology thus: “The science or study of being; that department of metaphysics which relates to the being or essence of things, or to being in the abstract.” The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, Anselm of Canterbury’s notable 12th. century definition of faith holds that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Anselm’s discernment is that the human mind a priori is given that insight, (general revelation), and that Judeo-Christian faith knows that One as God. God’s Self-revelation (special revelation) in Israel’s history and in the Talmud, and God’s work of sacrifice and redemption through the enfleshed Second Person of the Trinity, Christ Jesus, Anselm discerns, reveal God’s metaphysical work of the Spirit, the ontology of ultimacy and essence of being, of “being in the abstract.”

Algorithmic science accepts the physical, but not the metaphysical.

“Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord” (Psalm 150:6).

Thanks be to God.