I'm Sorry Dave, But I Think You Missed It

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