*** Reply to message from "Carlos E. R."
No, MS did not exist when Mr. Clark wrote that.
Actually, HAL is very "human". It was given instructions (hide information from the crew) that conflicted heavily with its basic design (give all information) - and this fact was hidden from HAL designer, Mr Chandra. Thus, it developed a mental illness, thinking that only he was really necessary, the human crew redundant, and trying to severe the connection with the source of conflicting orders (ie, Earth) :-p
That was pretty much as Clark described it in a later interview.Chandra was attempting to make the computer as human as posible , and it was Chandra who thought of HAL as more important to the success of the mission than the human crew. Chandra was very much an introvert and didn't have a lot of use for human contact. It was thought, when considered even further that HAL might have developed similar problems mimicing serious mental diseases strictly on the basis of Chandra's programming him. Arthur Clark thought many computer scientists had much too much of their own being invested in some of their computer alter egos, and were in many ways "stage mothers and fathers" in that. Nothing must be said against their "baby", and no critisim was ever allowed to stand. He had hope tho, did Clark, that no one person would be so intertwined w/ a single point of failure , as HAL and any decendants might become, and that such failures would be caught before they became life threatening. 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... Of course, a lot of the thinking about plot points etc happened afterwards, as the story for the movie was made up as they went from a brief outline. And the way movies are made is get it on film first and figure out what it means later. -- j -- nemo me impune lacessit