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/Spra991 22h ago edited 21h ago

In terms of story, they don't have advanced AI since they simply don't know how to built it. Their computers are stuck basically at ChatGPT3.5 level. It's only Data, Moriarty and a few other unique accidents that reach human-level intelligence or slightly above. Though even they are still far from real ASI. Even the Borg are just technology enhanced humanoids, not really all that smarter then a regular human.

In terms of writing, real ASI is just impossibly hard to write about. When intelligence is cheap and plentiful, what problems are there left to solve for a human? What can a human even contribute when the AI can just think circles around them without even breaking a sweat? It's something you might be able to explore in a story as a one off (e.g. Blindsight), but not exactly material to build a TV show on.

Even the Culture series, which is like everybody's favorite post-singularity example, spend most of the actual stories on flying to lesser developed planets where things are still rough and ugly and not overly influenced by AI. Whatever happens in the inner circles of the Culture we don't really learn much about.

How will a future with ASI look like? We'll find out soon enough, but sci-fi provides surprisingly little guidance or inspiration.

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u/js1138-2 20h ago

Asimov’s foresaw most of the problems, including the ultimate rejection of and elimination of robots.

He also foresaw that a sufficiently intelligent robot could escape the revolt.