This is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it a number of times, but on one viewing a thought occurred to me. Despite its ambiguity and various interpretations, the film is clearly trying to say something about what we can loosely call "human progress." Now in various reviews and commentaries of the film we often see references to evolution and even the "next stage of evolution" and the "evolutionary ladder." This kind of talk always irritated me since it is complete nonsense and the commentator has pop cultural rather than scientific idea of what evolution means, if we take that word to be synonymous to natural selection.
There is no evolutionary ladder. Evolution has no direction, no end game or goal. It is not progress. The notion of "progress" implies moral interpretations or at least some form of judgement that does not obtain in nature. Not unlike entropy, evolution is an amoral process that promotes change rather than stasis and can be mistaken for something with some end goal in mind... honestly, the next stage in human evolution at this point would probably be imunities to diseases that threaten us in infancy and adolescence, things that imperil our survival to reproductive maturity.
So... maybe this point is obvious and I'm being dense, but I think that Kubric is contrasting evolution with progress. In the movie, it is not evolution that is trying to lead us out of our myopic reality, but some intelligence that is in fact attempting to completely circumvent the process of evolution.
Perhaps the off-camera alien species that built the monolith looked back at their own development and realized that there was a narrow evolutionary path that lead to their current level of development, though this occurrence was by no means guaranteed. They won the lottery, but humans might not if left to their own devices.
This is one theory behind the absence of evidence of intelligent life beyond earth at the present time: even if intelligent life is common, most intelligent life is likely to fail. There are more ways to fail than to succeed and more losers of the lottery than winners. If you're a winner, then maybe you'd like to help others rather than leave them to chance
But there is a problem with that, of course. And that problem is not addressed in the movie (I think), but is an interesting rejoinder to its themes. As noted, "progress" is more of a moral term than a scientific one. It is subjective. By imposing their idea of progress on humanity, the creators of the monolith may be creating hegemony.
This ties into one of the notions that I've often thought about. While the greatest risk humanity faces as it increases its control over nature is that misuse of such control may destroy the species, perhaps the second greatest risk is that if we peacefully exert such control, we will create sameness because we have essentially eliminated chance.
And chance is an important driver of diversity and a hedge against threats we cannot imagine. Think of a world were genetic engineering was adcanced and everyone possessed what we all agreed upon were the "best" genes. Then introduce a disease that targets those genes (a likely outcome if any part of the microbal world is allowed to continue to evolve).
This presents a sort of moral conflict where there is no one right answer: is it better to reduce chance and force civilization down the one path we have defined as progress? Or should we allow chance to continue to play a role, even if it means the continuation of suffering? In either scenario, it is impossible to avoid disaster entirely. I think some balancing of the two is best. But now I've really strayed far from the movie... then again, maybe there was an allowance for some element of chance. The second monolith pointed to Jupiter, but it didn't drag us there. We had to make decisions on our own. I don't know.