Piers Bizony on the prophetic nature of 2001
"Rocket experts happily argue about [the film 2001's] docking arrangements and control-panel layouts; but none of the machinery is out of bounds in terms of what we could actually achieve."
- Piers Bizony
It's difficult to believe that it's been fifty years since Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's epic film 2001 first graced cinema screens around the world. Writing in the journal Nature, science journalist Bizony runs through a number of technological advances that the film predicted, including iPads, space stations and the ennui of people made redundant by technology. On the other hand, perhaps we should be grateful that their vision of artificial intelligence has yet to be realized: "Kubrick’s red-eyed genius outsmarts them all".