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Norman Papers
Semimathematical games? Weird. What a lack of imagination. No sports? No competitive games between Frank and Dave? Of course, when the movie was made, the entire genre of computer games didn't exist, and the writers failed to foresee them. That's what happens when you leave prediction up to the technocrats: all they think of is the technology, not having fun.
The film also leaves out music and books, which seems very strange, unless somehow, the producers thought viewers wouldn't be interested in them. But can you imagine a life without music? No rock and roll? No classical? No country and western? The only music in the entire film (not counting the theme) are David's parents singing "Happy Birthday" over the videophone link and HAL himself, when being disconnected singing "Daisy, Daisy," the song taught to him by his creator. Nor do we see the astronauts writing letters or diaries. (I guess in 1968 nobody realized that astronauts would be offered lucrative book deals.) No photographs (though Dave does a few bland sketches of the crew). No music. Yawn. All there is to do is exercise and check on HAL, not that HAL should need checking. And talk to Houston control.
So poor David and Frank, awake for the many months on the flight to
Jupiter, have virtually nothing to do. After all, HAL does all the
important things. Yet, boredom, a well-known result of overautomation,
can have serious consequences. In factories, ships, and aircraft, when
operators have too little to do, they are "out of the loop"; that
is, they are no longer on top of the details of the task. When
something goes "boom," they take seconds to react, seconds to get
going. More often than is desirable, they fail.
Human Error
The major source of accidents in commercial aviation today is human
error. Mind you, I believe that most of this error is caused by poor
design of equipment and procedures. Whatever the reason -- as I
point out in my Psychology of Everyday Things -- error
is very frequent. A NASA study of aviation flights indicates that
pilots make roughly a dozen errors during a transcontinental
flight. If errors are so common, why are there so few in 2001? The
real reason, of course, is that the sort of bumbling errors we all
commit in real life don't make for a good movie. Movies are about
storytelling, and the foibles of everyday life would simply get in the
way.
Nor would emphasizing poor design details create dramatic scenes. My examination of the control panels of the spaceship, the shuttle, the lunar bus, and Discovery show them to be the same sort of poorly organized push buttons and lights that lead to so many errors in real life.
It's also amusing to watch Dave and Frank checking the ship by making
written notes on clipboards. Look up, read a number, look down, and
enter it in the correct column. I guess the designers failed to
anticipate automatic logging equipment, handheld computers, or PDAs
-- personal digital assistants. All that hand-recording is bound
to lead to error, especially given the inconvenient translation
between digital display and clipboard. I presume that the astronauts
then transcribed the clipboard readings into some sort of
machine-readable form -- another opportunity for error. Nor do
they even seem to be checking one another -- one standard way of
attempting to catch error.
