Fifty years ago the public experienced the first screening of what is widely considered the greatest and most influential science fiction film of all time: 2001: A Space Odyssey. More than any filmmakers before or since, writer Arthur C Clarke and Director Stanley Kubrick strove to get the science and technology right, to envision a technological future with as much accuracy and precision as possible. To this end they worked with experts from the American space agency NASA, and with electronics and computer corporations such as IBM, Honeywell, Pan Am Airlines, Hilton Hotels, and many many others, as well as leading academics such as artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky all to portray a compelling and realistic vision of 35 years later. Some of these visions proved remarkably accurate for the year 2001: Astronaut Frank Poole plays HAL in an enjoyable game of chess; in 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue triumphed over world champion Garry Kasparov in full tournament play. In other areas, such as computer vision, language understanding, and artificial intelligence, the filmmaker’s visions were too optimistic. What about now—50 years after the film’s release? It is clear that reality is finally catching up to—and in some cases exceeding—the film’s visions, in areas of computer hardware, computer vision, speech recognition, language understand, computer graphics and others. Most importantly, in 2018 serious scholars and technologists are taking seriously the ethical concerns and deep dangers of artificial intelligence, as was portrayed so compellingly in the landmark movie.