Today in Technology History

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March 7

Movie director Stanley Kubrick died three years ago, on March 7, 1999. Several of his best-known movies deal explicitly with technology and its social consequences.

"'Dr. Strangelove' and '2001: A Space Odyssey' are Kubrick's masterpieces. The two films share a common theme: Man designs machinery that functions with perfect logic to bring about a disastrous outcome. The U.S. nuclear deterrent and the Russian 'doomsday machine' function exactly as they are intended, and destroy life on earth. The computer HAL 9000 serves the space mission by attacking the astronauts." - Movie critic Roger Ebert

The 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is the most famous cinematic satire of the Cold War policies of nuclear deterrence and "Mutual Assured Destruction." In the movie, a rogue American general launches a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, eventually resulting in the destruction of the world.

The character of Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, is a deranged wheelchair-bound advisor to the U.S. president. Because of his hawkish attitude and his German accent, the character is considered to be a parody of one (or some, or all) of the following men: Edward Teller (a nuclear physicist), Leo Szilard (another nuclear physicist), Wernher von Braun (the rocket scientist), Herman Kahn (the theorist of nuclear war), John von Neumann (physicist, economist and computer pioneer) or even Henry Kissinger (then a Harvard professor who had written books on foreign policy and nuclear weapons).

Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" is based on the novel of that name by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Released in 1968, a year before man walked on the Moon, Kubrick convincingly brought weightlessness and space technology to the screen. Much of the plot involves a super-intelligent computer named HAL which starts to kill the astronauts it was designed to assist.

Kubrick intended to return to the subject of intelligent machines in a later project, but he died before finishing it. That project was completed by Steven Spielberg and released last year as the film "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence," the story of a robotic boy.

Related links:

• Click here for Kubrick's entry in the Internet Movie Database.

• Click here for pictures and sounds from "Dr. Strangelove."

• To read about the controversy over whom Dr. Strangelove parodies, click here.

• Use these links for pictures and sounds from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

• Click here for the homepage of "A.I."

 

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