“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” Dr. Dave Bowman’s famous line in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey opened our imaginations to the extent to which AI could influence our lives, for both good and bad. Interestingly, in humankind’s case, at least for us Gen Xers and older, the bad influence was our introduction to this new frontier through that movie.
Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick wrote the novel and screenplay simultaneously in the late 1960s. Although AI entered our collective Western consciousness that long ago, it’s only now occurring to us that it will undoubtedly play an imminent role in our lives.
Maybe younger people don’t have that built-in negative context prejudicing them against AI. Maybe they haven’t seen 2001. It left a deep impression on me. So have Kubrick’s other movies. To me, 2001 could almost be classified as a horror movie. There just seemed to be a dread building in each scene. As beautiful as the movie is and as compelling as the visual effects still are, the story warns of a dark future. Is that future just being realized for us?
I push myself to accept that we will move forward positively toward AI and other technologies. Every time I learn about what Garmin and the other avionics OEMs are doing with aviation computing, it makes me feel good. This month, the dynamic duo of Rich Pickett and Tigre Pickett discuss Garmin’s new G3000 PRIME system (not AI) and aviation’s future with AI, respectively. I can feel (even if I don’t actually have any real information) that the future of some, if not all, aviation operations will have AI components sooner rather than later, especially in Part 121 ops.
Some of us know that the designation of Dr. Bowman’s sentient onboard computer HAL was a type of Caeser Cipher or ROT-N (rotational cipher) for the acronym IBM (International Business Machines). It was 1928 when IBM started making punch cards for data memory in the U.S. for massive projects like the national census. A few years earlier, the Wright brothers flew their flyer in Kitty Hawk. Welcome to 2025. AI is on the horizon, and innovations are going to come often and fast, I anticipate.
