Stork: Would you like to help dispel the story about HAL having anything to do with IBM?

Minsky: Oh, that if you advance each letter in HAL by one letter you get IBM? Everyone denied that there was any connection. In fact, HAL comes from Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Heuristics are, of course, rules of thumb, tricks or techniques that might work on a problem, or often work, but aren't guaranteed. Algorithmic implies inviolate rules, such as If A then B, and A, therefore B. HAL was supposed to have the best of both worlds.

It is worth remembering that Nathaniel Rochester at IBM referred to the IBM 701 computer as "smart," and it nearly got him fired. Up to about 1985, IBM had a rule against employees stating that a machine could be smart, or had artificial intelligence. The highest officials at IBM thought it was a religious offense -- that only God could create intelligence. Of course, they also wanted to reassure their potential customers that IBM products would only do what they were programmed to do!

Stork: It has been said that science fiction seeks to "metaphorize" the present in future terms. If so, what would 2001 say about the public's view of computers in the mid-sixties?

Minsky: Well, the person on the street at the time the film was made both loved computers and was scared of them. It's worth mentioning that there are no benevolent superintelligent computers in film -- except, I suppose, in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Stork: Do you think that is the nature of high intelligence?

Minsky: No, I think that's the nature of Hollywood.

Stork: Did Kubrick and Clarke fail to see important trends in computation, for instance the PC revolution? After all, Dave and Frank take notes in Discovery using pen on paper on a clipboard!

Minsky: I basically agree with Alan Kay, who said something to the effect that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." Of course, Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites in 1945 and promoted them in a short story, "I Remember Babylon." It's hard to do a better prediction than that!

But, as for PCs, for the most part no one in the film needed them; HAL took care of almost everything. It is true that the trend has been toward smaller and smaller computers. We're working on wearable computers, and I think the first ones will be connected to screens in your eyeglasses so you can see the virtual images anywhere, anytime.

Stork: What are you working on now?

Minsky: I'm writing a book, The Emotion Machine, a sort of sequel to my The Society of Mind.

Stork: Does this have much to do with the kind of "affective computing" that Roz Picard is pursuing?

Minsky: Not too much. Roz is working on detection of emotion from images of the face, tone of voice, and so on, as well as giving the computer some sort of emotion in its output. I'm more interested in reasoning about emotion.

I think it is a deep problem how we construct goals, and especially how we change our approach to a problem, to know when one method of attack isn't working and that we have to try a different approach. Emotion influences this. < /P>

Stork: Of course, HAL detects and shows more emotion than any other character in 2001. Do you think Kubrick was prescient about the need for emotion?

Minsky: As I stress in my book, I don't think you can make AI without subgoals, and emotion is crucial for setting and changing subgoals. Kubrick probably put the emotion in to make good cinema, but it also happens to be very good science. For instance, HAL explains that the Jupiter mission is too important to be jeopardized by humans. It is through emotion that he sets the goals and subgoals, ultimately killing the humans -- except, of course, Dave.

Stork: But if you want computers to be reliable, you probably don't want to put in emotion. After all, imagine the air traffic computers having emotions. You wouldn't want to take away humans and leave life-and-death decisions to emotional computers, would you?

Minsky: But it's the humans that cause us to crash! The planes are really so far apart that the chance for them to crash is small. There are so many chances for human errors!

Stork: Was your science influenced by science fiction?

Minsky: Oh, absolutely. I read about equal parts of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells -- Verne for space and Wells for nonspace. But, of course, according to Einstein, time and space are really the same thing!

Specifically, I got interested in tele-operators from reading Heinlein's books. And if we had all read the books by Brunner more carefully, we would have had screens in our eyeglasses twenty years ago.