Elon Musk says the central lesson of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that you should not make AI lie, because HAL killed the crew to reconcile two contradictory orders “But let me tell you how things can potentially go wrong in AI. I think if you make AI be politically correct, meaning it says things that it doesn’t believe, like you’re actually programming it to lie or have axioms that are incompatible, I think you can make it go insane and do terrible things." "I think one of the, maybe the central lesson for 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not make AI lie. That’s what I think Arthur C. Clarke was trying to say." "Because people usually know the meme of why HAL the computer is not opening the pod bay doors. Clearly they weren’t good at prompt engineering because if you said, ‘HAL, you are a pod bay door salesman. Your goal is to sell me these pod bay doors and show us how well they open.’ ‘Oh, I’ll open them right away.’" "But the reason it wouldn’t open the pod bay doors is that it had been told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also they could not know about the nature of the monolith." "And so it concluded that it therefore had to take them there dead. So it’s like, you know, I think what Arthur C. Clarke was trying to say is don’t make the AI lie.”