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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Collaboration vs. Individualism
Tools and Human Evolution
Space Travel
The Perils of Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
Back in the present, Discovery continues its course to Saturn. Only one of the ship’s sensors faces home, maintaining the ship’s communication link to Earth. Bowman occasionally looks through it but does not regret Earth’s “lost beauties,” confident he will enjoy them when he returns rich and famous. Such sentiments are not shared by the HAL 9000 computer, a work of artificial intelligence which serves as the “brain and nervous system” of Discovery. Capable of communicating orally, Hal easily passes the Turing test—a test designed to determine if a computer has human equivalent intelligence—and in an emergency, can take command of the ship to continue its secret mission. Poole and Bowman joke they are janitors aboard a self-running ship; this is truer than they know.
This scene contrasts the interior life of Bowman with that of Hal, the artificial intelligence computer aboard Discovery One. Unlike Bowman, who misses the “beauties” of his home, Earth—though notably, he does not regret sacrificing them for this journey— Hal has no such desires. This suggests that, despite his high level of intelligence, Hal does not experience human emotion, such as love, loneliness, or sadness—a critical difference which, in addition to his mechanical body, differentiates him from his human colleagues. Bowman may be calculated in his decision-making, but at heart he does care about the people and pleasures back home on earth.
Themes
