Just Science Fiction

One of the unanswered mysteries in 2001: A Space Odyssey: Why did the HAL 9000 supercomputer malfunction and murder nearly the entire crew on the trip to Jupiter?

In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two it was explained that

HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders.....required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security.

HAL's architecture was based on openness and transparency, but government higher-ups ordered HAL to conceal important information from the crew. HAL went through the computer equivalent of a psychotic break.

Forbes [bold added]:

In the case of Obamacare, the web site was made needlessly complex just in order to avoid this sort of transparency [as programmed into Medicare Part D]. There was probably fear in the White House that if consumers browsed plans and saw the list cost (without first knowing how much the government would subsidize their plan) many people would not return.

At the end of 2001 sole survivor David Bowman performs a "lobotomy" on HAL to save the ship. Bowman finishes the mission by operating everything manually. Human beings having such resourcefulness, however, is probably just science fiction. © 2013 Stephen Yuen