A questão toda é que GERTY não é HAL. A principal motivação da HAL é a segurança da missão e a segurança do navio, mesmo que isso signifique matar a tripulação. Em comparação, GERTY parece ciente de que, sem Sam, a missão falhará. Isso significa manter a versão atual sã ou (quando ocorrerem problemas) ...
killing him and replacing him with another one of the stock of Sam clones.
Como Duncan Jones (o diretor do filme) disse nesta entrevista à imprensa, ele queria subverter o significado de uma inteligência artificial maléfica, sendo o principal vilão do filme.
Interviewer : You talked fairly openly about what many call the twist in the film. For me, though, what was the major surprise was
Gerty at the end, that you knocked the idea of what to expect. You
seemed to be having a lot of fun playing with the old conventions of
the genre?
Duncan Jones : Absolutely. The more of them we could come up with, the more fun that it was. Gerty and HAL were obviously one
reference...All these things that we were trying to do to make people
really expect a certain thing and then go in a different direction
with it. We tried to do that in a number of different places.