At Telluride Film Festival, Bill Gates Compares Lack of Control Over AI to HAL in ‘2001’: ‘You Could Say “Please Shut Down,” and It Would Say, “OK, I Took That Under Advisement, But…”‘

Plenty of comparisons have been made in recent years between fast-developing artificial intelligence systems and HAL, the rogue computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” that operated by its own sets of rules, ultimately disregarding human oversight. If that comparison ever seemed overstated, it may be worth knowing that tech mogul Bill Gates is now raising the issue of AI’s HAL-like qualities.

Said Gates, speaking at the Telluride Film Festival, “I mean, what we have now is almost like HAL in ‘2001,’ where you could say to it, ‘Please shut down,’ and it would say, ‘OK, I took that under advisement, but I’ve decided that all these other things I read and you told me to do outweigh that dictate.'”

Gates was participating in a panel about AI (punningly titled “AI AI AI”) in an outdoor park at the festival in Colorado Saturday. The Microsoft founder compared the AI that sees developing at a supersonic pace without true controls as being akin not only to HAL, but, potentially, to the alien invaders of films past that force governments to find common solutions on screen. He also invoked more realistic problems the world has faced since World War II as examples of how solutions to AI gaining too much independent power could still be found and agreed on, before those windows begin to close.