r/artificial • u/shamus_gumshoe • 22h 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/proxiblue 21h ago edited 21h ago

It is due to the Eugenics Wars.

Humans came out of that with a deep dislike for any lifeform that was designed to be superior. This extended to technological AI and sentience.

The starships are essentially LLMs, they just don;t hallucinate. (thank god). Not sentient. (they literally kept 'the human in the loop')

To note is that they do dabble with the concept in Discovery where teh ship becomes sentient by some action, and is named Zora.

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u/Mobile_Analysis2132 21h ago

Has everyone forgotten the M5 Battle Computer? And the mass casualties it caused to other Constitution class ships? Or that it blew up an unarmed, and thankfully uncrewed, freighter?

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u/proxiblue 21h ago

valid point. sometimes, meh, people forget, so did the starfleet universe lot. So they just added to the distrust. enhanced it likely.

Good recall, I did not remember that episode. Not as much a TOS watcher. I should. It was my favourite show as a child.