Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet
i09 publishes an excerpt from I MUST NOT THINK BAD THOUGHTS in which Mark Dery contemplates the sexual orientation of one of science fiction's most memorable machines: HAL, from 2001.
Now it can be told: HAL, the psychotic supercomputer in the sci-fi classic 2001, failed the Turing Test. Not Alan Turing's classic blindfold test for artificial intelligence, which the ultra-intelligent machine could pass "with ease" as Arthur C. Clarke notes in the novel on which Stanley Kubrick based his movie, but the test that Turing himself failed (albeit deliberately): that of passing for straight.
Published in: i09
Story Date: 2012-04-20T00:00:00
Story Date: 2012-04-20T00:00:00
