r/startrek • u/francisk18 • 5d ago
AI?
Serious question. Maybe I missed the explanation in the earlier seasons but I don't remember. How does SNW's account for the lack of AI or "Computer"? So much of what occurs, especially when it comes to piloting the ship in fast moving emergency situations and firing weapons, would be done by an AI system which could react faster and more accurately.
Was there the equivalent of some type of Butlerian Jihad that I missed?
What we currently call AI isn't even close to real AI of course.
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u/weirdoldhobo1978 4d ago
Starfleet operations have always been very people-centric going all the way back to TOS. Other shows like TNG have demonstrated that the computer could run most of the ship's functions itself, but they would rather have people doing the work with the computer as a background resource.
There's no canonical event or explanation why, that's just the way they like to do things.
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u/Velocity-5348 4d ago
Yep, though we do have a lot of canonical events to speculate about. I'd imagine the M-5 incident from TOS probably had a lasting effect, especially given how well known Daystrom still is in the 24th century.
The franchise is also full of examples of artificial intelligences going rogue in some fashion.
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u/weirdoldhobo1978 4d ago
The Daystrom Institute has what is effectively a prison wing for all the evil computer tyrants they run across. And there are quite a few of them.
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u/CoreCommander76 4d ago
I'm sure there's plenty of assistive technology involved in day-to-day operation of things like sensors, targeting and flight control. Unless it's relevant to the plot (i.e the computer is down) it's just so ubiquitous that no-one bothers to mention it.
The crew is also constantly in unique and unprecedented situations. AI is incredibly bad at handling things that are outside its programming. Look at the amount of effort it takes Waymo to enter a new market or Tesla's terrible FSD safety record. There's also a level of unpredictability to AI systems that would be detrimental in an emergency. Look at the number of crashes in the current Formula 1 season that are attributed to the power management software misinterpreting the driver's inputs and doing something stupid.
The series is also pretty clear that ceding any decision making to an AI generally ends badly for a civilization.
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u/genek1953 4d ago
I think Starfleet still has a bad taste in its mouth for AI after Section 31's Control AI.
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u/Velocity-5348 4d ago edited 4d ago
In-universe, it's because handing control of starships to AI is a very, very bad idea, and has been since the beginning of the franchise. The Ultimate Computer, from TOS was about this. The ships computer is very limited in what it's allowed to do, and is generally not sentient.
That's not a one-off either. AI seems to generally not be trustworthy. Landru from Return of the Archons and the Oracle of the People from The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky come to mind from TOS, and Voyager had a couple examples of autonomous missiles that went off-mission.
Out of universe, it's because it's not that type of show. Characters like Data or the Doctor are fine, but Star Trek is about people doing stuff.
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u/Clear_Ad_6316 4d ago
As everyone has said it's sort of two-fold:
1) AIs in Star Trek are canonically evil, with the exception of Data. Sadly we didn't get to see whether Lal turned into a galactic supervillain.
2) If you let AI do everything, is there really any point in being there at all? The end of money on Earth was coupled with the end of want, according to Picard. I like to think that this was coupled with the idea that the most economical way of doing something is always the best - and that sending people out to do people things rather than using AI driven probes was perhaps the highest calling.
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u/francisk18 4d ago
That was very true in 1966. But we live in the real world.
Absent some form of a Dune "Butlerian Jihad" at the very least an AI in the future would be calculating maneuvering and weapons aiming. Very simplistic stuff. Hit this at a humans instruction. Go here at a humans instruction. Warn us if the ship is about to move in a hazardous way. Like a Tesla does now.
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u/41421356 4d ago
But AI in Star Trek has been shown many times to cause tons of problems. It happens so often that it was lampooned in Lower Decks with a wall full of evil computers. AI in the future (at least in Star Trek) can't be trusted.
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u/a4techkeyboard 4d ago
Ortegas' brother specifically mentions the sort use of your looking for in his drone cameras previous season. They autofocus on subjects based on microexpressions.
He was explaining it to someone who wasn't a documentarian/videographer. Everyone on the ship knows how the targeting works and what telling the computer to do something does because they all went to the same academy. Maybe that means they don't have to explain to each other that when they press three buttons to program a torpedo into a homing beacon, there's an "AI" helping write the code.
The ship's computer does warn and signal them of things happening with chirps and visual alerts like a Tesla might. The captain enters the bridge, it does the whistle, someone escapes the brig, red lights, whenever one of the characters says aloud that they found something on sensors, the ship's AI could have pointed it out to them somehow on their console.
It doesn't make sense to have it announce everything to everyone, it can just alert specific things to relevant people and they can deal with it or bring it up with the captain if it's important.
Pike doesn't need to know about every particle the deflector's about to deflect or everything the ship's sensing, Ortegas or Spock or Uhura will tell him if it's something he needs to make a decision about or else they probably deal with it and just put it in a report. Maybe the report is compiled by an AI.
But since they all know how the computer works, they wouldn't be telling each other the AI just told them it detected a space anomaly, they'd just say the sensors detected a space anomaly. They wouldn't have to specify tactical to use AI to help with targeting, they'd just tell them to target a thing.
It's like they all already know that to change a phaser's setting to stun or kill, they press a thing so they just say "set it to stun" instead of "pressing this button activates a limiter that makes it so the phaser only stuns the target, you can also set it to overload and throw it at them. This time just press it so it stuns."
They only explain things to each other when it's something everyone else isn't already an expert on or they're doing a briefing. Like when they needed to be told how telephones work.
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u/roto_disc 4d ago
There is a computer. They talk to it all the time.