Computers and Humanness

Stanley Kubrick’s now classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) presents a fantasy of what future technological developments would bring to the world: space travel, videoconferencing, and a computer capable of what we now call artificial intelligence.

HAL, the computer protagonist, becomes increasingly intelligent as the film progresses, and by the end it has developed a range of emotions ranging from jealousy to joy. The science fiction film left many viewers with a sense of anxiety, having watched a computer become so human that it threatened the spaceship’s inhabitants. Becoming human meant becoming covetous, power-hungry, greedy, and sadistic.

Fifty-seven years after A Space Odyssey, many of the film’s fantasies have become reality: video calls are now ubiquitous; space travel is close to becoming accessible to a larger segment of the population; and computer technologies have advanced to a point never imagined by the film’s writers.

But the filmmakers erred in one crucial aspect: computers have not developed feelings - good or bad - or become more human. Instead, it is humans that seem to have lost feelings and become computer-like. From an early age, children are glued to screens, and adults use their phones’ algorithms to shop, order food, arrange dates, and meet people. Gradually, humans have become less expressive, as they spend more hours having their lives organized by computers.

When we watch the film today, HAL, the computer from 1968, seems quaintly human: it is expressive, passionate, and vocal … unlike many humans in 2025. HAL became so human it wanted to take over the spaceship. What will twenty-first-century humans do when they become too computer-like?

Rubén Gallo is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor in Latin American Literature at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of many books on Twentieth Century culture, including Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Cultural Revolution (2006, MIT Press, winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize), Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (2010, MIT, winner of the Gradiva Prize), Proust’s Latin Americans (2014, Hopkins). He is also a novelist and was published two books on Cuba: Teoría y práctica de la Habana (2017) and Muerte en La Habana (2021). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. In 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.