Andrew Stuttaford links to Reihan Salam's Arthur C. Clarke obituary in the Atlantic, in which Salam writes:

Clarke all but worshipped advanced technology, and his novels were a mash note to heroic humans who transformed the world in a spirit of fellowship and boundless curiosity.But as a later generation of science fiction novelists and philosophers are asking now, what happens when the machines we create surpass us in raw intelligence and even creativity? Clarke dreamed up HAL, the intelligent computer at the heart of 2001, without considering that HAL, in a very real sense, rendered humanity obsolete. What is humanity's purpose in a world made by HAL? What Clarke failed to understand about the supposed "mind virus" of religious belief is that it answers exactly this question — it grounds human dignity in transcendent truth. And that's nothing to sneeze at.

It's been ages since I've read The Lost Worlds Of 2001, which documents the tens of thousands of words that Clarke wrote and the dozens of blind alleys that Clarke and Kubrick went down before coming up with the final screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Salam appears to have missed the entire point of the film. (And admittedly, the novelized version of 2001 is a very different experience that Kubrick's more open-ended movie version, even though both were created concurrently.)

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Kubrick's 2001 is structured to be a journey up the evolutionary ladder of man's intellegence. Beginning with the appearance of the alien monolith to nudge "Moonwatcher" into something approaching sentience, including a sense of how to create and use tools (the bone he uses to defend his tribe's watering hole--and can you say "Intelligent Design"? I knew that you could), the film then moves to modern man, in the form of the passive, but secretive scientist/bureaucrat Heywood Floyd, before reaching artificial intelligence in the form of HAL 9000.

(Just as Floyd was a mid-1960s conception of a then-modern era bureaucrat, sort of along the lines of, say, Robert Mcnamara, Hal is of the same era, a prediction of what an intelligent machine would resemble. Blade Runner would later posit what neuroses artificial intelligence would have if it was encased in human form, rather than a mainframe computer.)

The third segment of 2001, which pits the Discovery's astronauts against HAL as their space craft travels to Jupiter, is a symbolic battle of man versus machine. If Hal had won and entered the Star Gate in orbit around Jupiter, and taken the film's vaunted "Ultimate Trip" to meet the alien race behind the monoliths, then clearly a very different creature would have returned to Earth than the Nietzschian "Star Child" at the film's conclusion. Maybe something like V'Ger, or the Borg on Star Trek, instead.

But in any case, it's clear from the movie that Kubrick understood full well that HAL rendered mankind, in its current form as obsolete. Which means Clarke probably did as well. Kubrick's 2001 posits that man is near obsolete anyhow, and in need of spiritual rebirth, as indicated by the banality of the language and the deliberately low-key performances, especially, in both cases, when compared to the film's predecessor, the gonzo, hellzapoppin' Dr. Strangelove.

(Incidentally, for the best guide to the structure and subtext of the film version, try to get a hold of a copy of Carolyn Geduld's 1973 Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Kubrick once read, approvingly, according to a quote from one of Kubrick's relatives in Taschen's massive tomb of Kurick-a-brac.)