TOS' hostility toward advanced computers

One cannot help but notice that TOS seems to have a distinct hostility toward computers and advanced machines. They are NEVER shown to be useful and are usually depicted as a threat to human life. This stands in stark contrast to all of the later series who had a much more favorable approach to technology.

Most intelligent machines were depicted as malevolent or at the veryleast a malevolent influence

Nomad
M5
The Doomsday Machine
Landru
Vaal

Even Kirk's personal computer was, with its female personality, was depicted as an annoyance. This of course does not include the various androids (which are quietly forgotten in on TNG in order to make Data special).

Why do you think that the show seemd so hostile toward machines? was it simply a lack of familiarity with the technology? (i.e. by the time of TNG people were familiar with computers and thus less afraid of them).

 

At the heart of many TOS stories was the notion that humans, despite their greatly advanced technology, still carried with them the same flaws that had plagued civilization since its beginning. Those who gave into their flaws -- ego, greed, vanity, arrogance, jealousy, vengeance, hypocrisy, and so forth -- were doomed to failure. Thus, it was the human condition that needed to be improved upon. The constant reminder that machines, superior in some ways, were also flawed because they were built by flawed beings was an easy way to drive the point home within a sci-fi context. It was also a trope left over from Forbidden Planet and other classic films.

 

These machines though, have usually gone awry...hence the problem they therefore create.

 

TOS was a product of the time, and at the time, computers were new.

Joe, 1101100101000100101000011111

 

I wasn’t around back then, but judging by the TV of the day, I get the distinct impression that a fear of the advances of technology was common among the public, and TV simply reflected those attitudes. The Twilight Zone is another series that frequently played off that theme.

 

Star Trek was so forward thinking, they were anticipating all the problems with Microsoft products!!

 

I imagine that at least some of it was just the writers looking for creative ways to invent antagonists for the stories. Computers, at least, don't twirl their moustaches.

 

The Moustachetron 9000 does.

Rey, contrary

 

It is funny, but while there were a few times where the computers were the problem, more often they were part of the solution. Unfortunately viewers of the show today have computers at their every turn in life so overlook many of the uses of computers in the show that were not only science fiction back then, they bordered on fantasy.

In forty years the fans of the show have taken some aspects of it and made them so common place in todays world as to be practically invisible to 21st century viewers.

For example, most people think of communicators, phasers and tricorders when thinking of TOS props, but this card reader is almost universally overlooked...

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This device could be comparable to today's PDAs, iPods or Zunes... with a screen for displaying information of comparable size. One has to wonder why productions like Phase II haven't used this device to have a character watching a movie while relaxing in their bunk?

Or how about comparing two images side by side on a computer screen... with the images stored in memory!

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A lot of what happens in TOS happen because of the computers, it is just so everyday for us now that it is hard to see how fantastic it was back then.

 

I always admired Kirk's ability to outwit or unplug a wayward super-computer.

 

I think Kirk was onto something, I wanted to kill my work PC today.

 

Computers were often treated as Gods and their defeat represented throwing off our need for Gods/religion.

 

The Terminator franchise could stand to borrow him for a bit so Kirk can convince Skynet to self-terminate

 

Indeed. Trek was very clear that computers were wonderful tools but that mankind should never be in a position where the tool calls the shots. Spock says that almost verbatim in "The Ultimate Computer."

Dr. Who, by contrast, was somewhat more technophobic: in place of flesh-and-blood recurring adversaries like the Klingons and Romulans, it presented the Daleks and Cybermen. I wonder if this had something to do with how much more traumatic the technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries (from the Industrial Revolution up through Hitler's buzz bombs and V-2s) were to Britain than to America.

 

I can agree with most points made here.
I'd add that one thing that really comes through to me strongly through TOS is humanism. I think artificial intelligence represents something else, and perhaps in a way it's a cautionary tale. It was a time of enormous advancement, and I don't think people were scared of technology, in fact I think people were rearing for that progression. I think TOS addresses the fact that no matter what we, as humans, create, it will always be subject to our failings. Like kirk told nomad, it's impossible for an imperfect being to create a perfect one.

This being said, I think it was also convenient as a plot device. They never really liked to show Kirk or the others killing if it could be helped, so having machines as the bad guys means the crew can destroy them with far fewer ethical quandaries.

 

I can see it now...

Kirk: Landru, I want you to go to your "Start" menu in order to turn yourself off...
Landru: [confused] "Start" menu to turn off ??? [Landru explodes]
.

 

I think you have to look at the 'hostility toward advanced computers' from the 1960s perspective. Star Trek wasn't the only science fiction show to be critical of a super computer, in the film 2001: A space odyssey, Hal (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) which in reality was IBM, Arthur C Clarke the writer simply took the next letter of the alphabet and so forth, as not to be sued by the computer giant, illustrates the fact that many people in that era did not trust machines making desicions. You have to remember the cold war is still going on and many of the nuclear weapons at the time were seen as operated by super computers that could make cold calculated desicions without feeling. Its not that those computers actually could launch the world into war, but it was the dominate perception that continued with the public well into the 1980s. If computers controlled our defences they could break down and make a mistake that could destroy all of humanity and so you had other sci-fi films like the movie Wargames. It seems only by the mid-late 1980s did the idea of computers taking over become less of a concern and so this theme is not really emphasized in TNG. Personally I like these themes in TOS, I think only until the film the Matrix came out did we start going back at revisiting this scary concept.

 

You forgot the Terminator movies. Even Gibson's Neuromancer plays off of the threat of a dangerous AI.

 

Yeah, in Neuromancer the threat is really as-read, though. Given his overall rather intense visualization of that world the fact (IMAO) that there is never any sense of real danger in unleashing the A.I.s is kind of a flaw in the narrative.

And in fact once they're "liberated" he has to move Wintermute and Neuromancer off-stage pretty much altogether in the sequels - really, the Hollywood melodrama of "Terminator" or "Colossus" would be a poor fit for Gibson's sensibilities.

 

It's a huge flaw and I never believed Gibson's heart was in that part of the story. As much as I like Gibson, his novels always seem hollow at the center that way--all the menace is up-close and personal, like a Hong Kong action flick, and pretty superficial. His Big Ideas, such as they are, seem like after-thoughts. Having said that, few novelists in any genre are as skilled at conveying atmosphere.