2001 is not just another year. For over three decades, those four digits symbolized the future, and triggered hopes, dreams and fears about what lay over the horizon. Brilliant though it was, Sir Arthur C. Clarke's imagination and Stanley Kubrick's rendering of life in the 21st century have also missed the mark. We have had no contact with alien civilizations, there are no permanent outposts in space and artificial intelligence has produced nothing like HAL 9000, the ship's computer that goes berserk and has to be unplugged. (To be fair, Mr. Clarke says the book was a vision, not a sketch.)
By most standards, life in our 21st century is decidedly more pedestrian than that portrayed in the movie. We are still Earth-bound and our computers rarely respond to voice commands; most of us are happy to find real intelligence in daily life; AI? Forget it.
But if our world is vastly different from the feverish imaginings of Mssrs. Clarke and Kubrick, it is still a fascinating place -- and certainly when compared to the dark ages of, say, five years ago. Today's mobile phones and the resources they put at our fingertips, courtesy of the Internet, are more Star Trek than 2001.