Comment 2001 won't be like "2001" (Score 1) 135
Rather glum conclusion :-) But there are a few nice things that we have that the movie does not, as I shall explain later on.
In particular, AI has proved to be a *much* more difficult problem than had been imagined a few decades ago. HAL 9000 could easily pass a very broad version of the Turing Test; the most that has been done in real life is to pass in very specialized domains. About Turing himself, he predicted both 10^9 bits of RAM being common and passing the Turing Test in 50 years; those 50 years have passed, and while the first is common, the second is not.
Other things, like advanced spaceflight, have not happened out of lack of political will.
However, we do have several things that the movie did not, as Donald Norman has pointed out. User interfaces are much improved. Instead of a lot of separate screens, we have screens that display virtual screens, which can overlap and which can be moved and resized at will. Furthermore, typewriter-style keyboards have been very successful at being generic sets of control buttons; most of the numerous specialized buttons in the movie are unnecessary.
Furthermore, we have varieties of computer entertainment that the movie has no hint of, such as 3D-graphics virtual-world games. Thus, an alternative to commanding very stylized armies on a very stylized battlefield, which is chess, would be to command armies on a battlefield with everything looking and acting very real-world (Myth or Warcraft/Starcraft). But it may be difficult to picture obituaries like "Dave rides HAL's rocket" or "HAL chews on Dave's boomstick".
But even in such games, it is very apparent that the AI is far behind HAL's standards. For example, I've found that a usually successful tactic is to attract an enemy's attention and then retreat around a corner. That enemy will usually walk right into that trap.
In particular, AI has proved to be a *much* more difficult problem than had been imagined a few decades ago. HAL 9000 could easily pass a very broad version of the Turing Test; the most that has been done in real life is to pass in very specialized domains. About Turing himself, he predicted both 10^9 bits of RAM being common and passing the Turing Test in 50 years; those 50 years have passed, and while the first is common, the second is not.
Other things, like advanced spaceflight, have not happened out of lack of political will.
However, we do have several things that the movie did not, as Donald Norman has pointed out. User interfaces are much improved. Instead of a lot of separate screens, we have screens that display virtual screens, which can overlap and which can be moved and resized at will. Furthermore, typewriter-style keyboards have been very successful at being generic sets of control buttons; most of the numerous specialized buttons in the movie are unnecessary.
Furthermore, we have varieties of computer entertainment that the movie has no hint of, such as 3D-graphics virtual-world games. Thus, an alternative to commanding very stylized armies on a very stylized battlefield, which is chess, would be to command armies on a battlefield with everything looking and acting very real-world (Myth or Warcraft/Starcraft). But it may be difficult to picture obituaries like "Dave rides HAL's rocket" or "HAL chews on Dave's boomstick".
But even in such games, it is very apparent that the AI is far behind HAL's standards. For example, I've found that a usually successful tactic is to attract an enemy's attention and then retreat around a corner. That enemy will usually walk right into that trap.
