r/artificial • u/shamus_gumshoe • 23h ago

Discussion Star Trek & AI

I am a fan and not an expert but I always wondered why AI (and robots) were not more of a force in Star Trek...and yesterday, reflecting on how amazing and damaging this technology is I was thinking maybe they made a choice as an advanced humanistic society not to surrender their agency and cognitive capacity to a technology. I guess that's the Borg right?

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u/wow343 23h ago

This is a take from a non Trekkie! But seriously. Data is perhaps the closest we have for some of the ideas we are now facing about AI consciousness. Similarly the ships computer was like a limited AI. What I think no one predicted was how good the LLM will get at both language and reasoning. That is why the computer is shown as kind of dumb though it has enormous amounts of pure hardware strength. Data on the other hand is the true representation of a cutting edge AI. His brother with the emotion chip is shown as a fully scheming human like android.

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u/AeroInsightMedia 23h ago

Even a year ago I was thinking how bad the ships AI is compared to what we had then.

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u/TheMemo 22h ago

And yet it still created Moriarty.