2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Directed by Stanley Kubrick): Sixty years on, this prophetic cold-war epic of human versus machine intelligence could not be timelier. Released in the run-up to Apollo 11 but launching itself from the “Dawn of Man,” it is a frontal assault on the myth of technology as panacea. Here instead, technology epitomizes the mechanization of death in the struggle for control of the earth: nation vs nation still just as ape vs ape, culminating in mutual assured destruction. The soundtrack famously directs us back to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with his reminder that it is humanity itself that history must overcome by means of a superhumanity that can finally leave murderous competition behind (along with its fantasy of perfected, disembodied, instrumental intelligence) — and step out, mature and peaceful at last, into an interstellar cosmopolis. Ventriloquizing Nietzsche ever-so-slightly to accommodate HAL’s fictional (and any real AI’s) personality, the protagonist can at last stake Kubrick’s claim: “I have seen them both naked, the greatest and the smallest [intelligence]. They are still all-too-similar to one another. Truly, I found even the greatest [computer] — all-too-human!” Thus spoke David Bowman. (recommended by Steve Robinson, Brandon University}