No longer is HAL 9000 a boring old computer eye on the wall. Thanks to the magic of CGI, his robot avatar now strolls about the corridors of Discovery One alongside Bowman and Poole.
In such a scenario Clarke could legitimately claim that having HAL be a robot was his “original idea” all along: drafts for such a scenario are in The Lost Worlds of 2001.
Not that it’d make the execution of a CGI-laden Special Edition any less awkward.