Our Culture is Stuck - A Bigger SPalash

The word ‘podcast’ is a portmanteau of the words iPod and Broadcast. The name ‘iPod’, in turn, was inspired by the ‘pod’ featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1968, one year before man landed on moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey was accurate in predicting video conferencing, AI voice assistants and tablet computing. In 2011, when Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement over the design of Galaxy tablets, Samsung argued in court that it was 2001: A Space Odyssey not Apple, that originally designed the tablet (see picture below). In the film, HAL 9000, a friendly AI voice assistant with human-like intelligence and consciousness, manages the operation of a spacecraft bound to Jupiter. In one scene, when HAL defies the order of its human, the disgruntled human turns it off, in effect murdering it. As Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose explains here, the film posed an imminent moral question: if Artificial Intelligence were to gain human-like consciousness, would it not be immoral to kill it

The word ‘podcast’ is a portmanteau of the words iPod and Broadcast. The name ‘iPod’, in turn, was inspired by the ‘pod’ featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1968, one year before man landed on moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey was accurate in predicting video conferencing, AI voice assistants and tablet computing. In 2011, when Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement over the design of Galaxy tablets, Samsung argued in court that it was 2001: A Space Odyssey not Apple, that originally designed the tablet (see picture below). In the film, HAL 9000, a friendly AI voice assistant with hum