What 2001: A Space Odyssey can tell us about life in 2018

The movie was made through a collaboration with science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick, inspired by Clarke's novel Childhood's End and his lesser-known short story The Sentinel. A striking work of speculative fiction, it depicts–in terms sometimes hopeful and other times cautionary–a future of alien contact, interplanetary travel, conscious machines, and even the next great evolutionary leap of humankind. The most obvious way in which 2018 has fallen short of the vision of 2001 is in space travel. People are not yet routinely visiting space stations, making unremarkable visits to one of several moon bases, nor traveling to other planets. But Kubrick and Clarke hit the bull's-eye when imagining the possibilities, problems and challenges of the future of artificial intelligence.