On Sat, 2004-09-11 at 19:00 -0500, jfweber@bellsouth.net wrote:
I guess it was a point of reference tho that HAL was NOT any form of a robot, since that programming would have violated the robotic imprimatur. No robot could ever harm a human, etc...
2001, A Space Odyssey wasn't written by Isaac Asimov, so that is pretty irrelevant, no? The jurisdiction of the laws of robotics is solely within the novel I, Robot and any attempts to cash in on it that may have followed. Several robots exist today whose explicit design is to destroy human life. As for HAL being similar to Microsoft, the fact is that HAL followed its programming, didn't suffer any crashes, and obeyed its programmer even to the point of disaster - so maybe HAL was linux? :) It would certainly fit in with the IBM connection