The Apes In The Film, 2001: A Space Odyssey

At the beginning, we observe what might be humans at their early stage living in harmony, until they discover the concept of a ‘tool’ and start using it to smash and kill their own kind and eat other species. Is the tool bad? Is it a mistake? Nope, it is not. It is not the tool but the one using it who makes it either good or bad. The apes are the ones who decided to use the tool to turn against nature and themselves — they are the ones who gave it such purpose. Assuming that such apes are our ancestors, we see that humanity develop their tools, going from using the bone to creating the spaceship and building the HAL 9000s.

HAL’s programmed principal objective is to pursue to a conclusion Discovery One’s mission, and it is seeing its human crew as being a hinderance to

Notice the outré breathing in the outer space scenes: it is showing the fact that men are completely out of their element in space, like fish out of the water. HAL then ‘makes a mistake,’ an error instigating the human crew to revolt versus it…? Nope, it does not. As Tim Dirks says in his film review 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), “is HAL correct or mistaken about the unit, or is the 'infallible' tool created by man deliberately conspiring against its human creators - the two astronauts? HAL's crack-up is undoubtedly the result of inborn (programmed) human error.” It is not the machine but the human who makes mistakes. A machine will do what you create it to do, else you made a mistake and created the machine wrong. As Thomas Caldwell says in his film review Free Will, Technology and Violence in a Futuristic Vision of Humanity – 2001: A Space Odyssey, “[HAL was] [p]rogrammed by humans to conceal key truths from Bowman and Poole as well as preserving the mission at all costs, which ends up translating as resorting to murder.” As Dirks also says, “Only HAL knows the real mission of the trip - both Bowman and Poole are unaware of the purpose of their Jupiter mission […]. The programmed computer