Here's Kubrick again, on 2001, from that same interview. He said:
"One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated -- as ours soon will be -- by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures."
It's clear to me that we are at the start of something. The network is the new electricity. It's at the beginning of its own 100 year journey.
Whether it's going to be easier or harder than Stafford Beer's pond to figure out how to speak to this new networked world... I don't know. It feels like multiple Wikipedia's worth of work to get good at it. Our current attempts at living alongside smart things are pretty crude. That's fine, beginnings are always crude.
And beginnings matter, we know that too. Not just because little 100 hour investigations are a great way to start 100 million hour efforts, or even 100 year journeys, but because culture is established right at the start.
It's worth making our own mini Tabo catastrophes to branch out on our own.
This is the time to try out saying hello to lamp posts, and to little printers. To try and identify the contours of the networked world. To run our own 100 hour experiments.
My bet is on fractional artificial intelligence - slightly smart interfaces - as a good way for us to relate to complex systems. Maybe it isn't, but i'm going to spend some time finding out.
I'd like to find an alternative to the tyranny of paper, and the tyranny of ease-of-use.
Matt Webb, Web Directions South 2014 (Sydney, Australia), October 2014