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At Telluride Film Festival, Bill Gates Compares Lack of Control Over AI to HAL in ‘2001’: ‘You Could Say “Please Shut Down,” and It Would Say, “OK, I Took That Under Advisement, But…”‘

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CitrixNews Staff
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At Telluride Film Festival, Bill Gates Compares Lack of Control Over AI to HAL in ‘2001’: ‘You Could Say “Please Shut Down,” and It Would Say, “OK, I Took That Under Advisement, But…”‘
Sep 6, 2026 10:08am PT At Telluride Film Festival, Bill Gates Compares Lack of Control Over AI to HAL in ‘2001’: ‘You Could Say “Please Shut Down,” and It Would Say, “OK, I Took That Under Advisement, But…”‘

Gates invoked the alien movies of yore in which governments bandied together to solve the invasion threat, saying, 'Believe me, the aliens are here — a foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can't even understand.'

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ChrisWillman See All TELLURIDE, COLORADO - SEPTEMBER 05: Bill Gates speaks during the "AI AI AI" panel at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival at Elks Park on September 05, 2026 in Telluride, Colorado. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images 2001 hal controls artificial intelligence Getty Images

Plenty of comparisons have been made in recent years between fast-developing artificial intelligence systems and HAL, the rogue computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” that operated by its own sets of rules, ultimately disregarding human oversight. If that comparison ever seemed overstated, it may be worth knowing that tech mogul Bill Gates is now raising the issue of AI’s HAL-like qualities.

Said Gates, speaking at the Telluride Film Festival, “I mean, what we have now is almost like HAL in ‘2001,’ where you could say to it, ‘Please shut down,’ and it would say, ‘OK, I took that under advisement, but I’ve decided that all these other things I read and you told me to do outweigh that dictate.'”

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