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2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 film and novel — still, six decades later, the canonical fictional treatment of artificial intelligence, first contact, and the relationship between technology and human transformation.
2001: A Space Odyssey exists as two simultaneous works: Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film and Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 novel, both developed in parallel from a 1948 Clarke short story, "The Sentinel." The film is one of the most influential works of 20th-century cinema. The novel is one of the most influential works of 20th-century science fiction. Together they form the template within which almost every subsequent imagining of artificial intelligence, first contact, and human-machine relations has operated, whether by homage, critique, or avoidance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The film's structure is in four movements: a prehistoric prologue ("The Dawn of Man") in which ape-men discover tools under the influence of an alien monolith; a present-day orbital sequence establishing routine spaceflight; a voyage to Jupiter aboard Discovery One during which the onboard AI HAL 9000 is given contradictory instructions and kills the crew; and a psychedelic finale in which the surviving astronaut, transformed