You don't want to overload your Vulcan! But then, Riker wasn't popular with the Bobs. So he went to just "Will."Take enough bridge jobs away from Spock and you get ... Riker.
Bridge Stations: TV Show vs. Realism
- Thread starter ZapBrannigan
- Start date
I love that game. Got pretty good at it.Piffle. The following Star Trek game is more exciting:
No one will be wearing VR headsets. They'll probably have visual data shot right into their optic nerves or brains in a Augmented Reality type fashion. Would make for lousy TV tho.
I think the ida that people would still be using pictures on glass centuries from now is an hopelessly antiquated a notion as the mechanical relay whirs and clicks of the Enterprise computers. Touch glass interfaces require you to look at them, which is rather like looking at the keyboard as your type. Future interfaces will surely utilize trained materials that can shape themselves into whatever controls you need are one way to go. Need transporter sliders? They rise up out of the panel so you can slide your fingertips across them without having to look at them. Need a QWERTY keyboard? Same.
I also don't think computer controlled UIs will ever be used for everything, because if the computer glitches you have no recourse. Somewhere there's always going to be a manual override or breaker box.
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Think one thing to note is that the bridge of the starship Enterprise is a combination of a Navy bridge and CIC (Combat information Center).
In the Navy, the bridge is merely responsible for driving the ship, whereas the CIC is used to coordinate operations. In Trek, the bridges function as a combination of the two.
In the Navy, the bridge is merely responsible for driving the ship, whereas the CIC is used to coordinate operations. In Trek, the bridges function as a combination of the two.
Weren't there bridge crew in VR headsets (or some future version of) on the USS Shenzhou at the very start of Discovery?
The Zumwalt -- is a US Navy vessel? Are those military personnel? Man, they look shlumpy. Hoodies and sweats? We are all gamers now.
I can't stand officers at press conferences, whatever, wearing their baggy camo things, though. Actual, y'know, suits, looked so much better.
Pardon me, going outside to yell at a cloud now.
I can't stand officers at press conferences, whatever, wearing their baggy camo things, though. Actual, y'know, suits, looked so much better.
Pardon me, going outside to yell at a cloud now.
Yep, good ol' Baby Daft Punk. Presumably, those screens on the outside are so the captain (or whoever) can still check out what's going on over her shoulder, just like the people at the normal stations.
On topic, the concept that the bridge is radial specifically so the captain can see what anyone is doing without leaving their chair is an important functional concept I feel like too many Trek bridge designs have lost in favor of a more filmicly straightforward arrangement that points everyone toward the viewscreen (or rather, the camera).
"Down in front, Captain!"
The more I learn about AI, the more I think that in TOS in-universe they've limited their use of it, and that this is or may have been a conscious choice even in the 1960's. Computers keep records and implement man-made decisions in TOS, but computer's don't "manage" anything. There's still a guy who looks at life-support readings all day. Clearly, the crew does not seem to want to trust that decision making to AI.
There's nothing in TOS to suggest a "Dune-like" crisis in its history. I think it was simply the modest forecast of the '60s writers. Having the computer talk, even with a stilted accent, probably seemed highly advanced at the time. Assigning someone to stare at life support monitors all day sounds both tedious and wasteful. It is better to have a machine do it, with instructions to alert a human, should the monitors fall outside of accepted ranges. But giving a machine "permission" to execute a specified set of routines is not surrendering entirely to the machine.
Kirk and company ran into many AIs with free reign to do whatever they pleased. The M5 was the only case in Federation domain. Landru sounded like a case similar to the M5. Vaal from "The Apple" may have been exactly what those people wanted. Yet along comes our intrepid Captain and upsets the whole thing. (Granted, Vaal fired the first shots, and threatened the Enterprise. However, Vaal was doing what it was programmed to do—protect the People of Vaal.)
The intelligent computer surpassing and oppressing humanity is a tired trope at this point. James P. Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow is one of the few stories I know where the AI becomes a partner to humanity—a unique and totally alien mind, yet mutually stronger in partnership than without. In fact, the story also details why such a self-aware machine was developed in the first place. (see Tyranny of Numbers)
Having a computer that could listen and speak was pure science fiction in the 1960s. The makers of Star Trek can be excused for not anticipating what we can dream about today as science fiction.
Talking machines were not unheard-of in pre-'60s sci-fi, although most tended to be humanoid robots, like Adam Link. Voder tech, which synthesizes human speech, began as early as the late 1930s, and research into speech recognition started even earlier. If such research was published in popular media, it would have been to a niche audience.
Star Trek was a generic framework into which many existing sci-fi stories might be adapted. An action element was required, especially if the original pilot was rejected for being "too cerebral." I don't hold it against the creators of TOS for any short-sightedness as futurists. That was not the purpose of the series. As is, many of the ideas were completely novel to a TV audience, and overloading the viewers would only scare them away. The "hand-wavium" that was introduced, like the transporter, was purely for the sake of moving the story along.
I was simply arguing against @Mres_was_framed! 's suggestion that automated systems were deliberately minimized in-universe.
The existence of an “Emergency Manual Monitor” in engineering suggests otherwise.
From the late 1930s, the Voder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder
And to clarify my remark, I said listen and speak. I meant listen, comprehend, and reply on-topic, not simply perform a text-to-speech function. I stand by what I said, this degree of natural language interactivity and artificial intelligence was pure science fiction. Only in the 21st century is it becoming reality. Being typical of the era and genre is irrelevant to that point.
Ah! Comprehension is another matter. When you said listen and speak, I assumed you meant little more than a verbal interface. That much has been available to consumers since the '90s.
I recall one YouTuber starting a video with, "Alexa, order a dozen cases of Moose brand beer!" Pause while he grinned, then continued, "Now, while you're dealing with that, let's talk about computer security!"
I recall one YouTuber starting a video with, "Alexa, order a dozen cases of Moose brand beer!" Pause while he grinned, then continued, "Now, while you're dealing with that, let's talk about computer security!"
No worries. I was being overly brief, but the operative word was intended to be "listen," with everything that entails.
A few further thoughts. The choice to have Majel speak in monotone was IMO a far more conservative choice than having a more natural sounding human voice, as was done in the case of Robby, B-9 on Lost in Space, and in short order HAL. I mean conservative in the sense of depicting an automated voice in a way in which it would clearly seem automated, as opposed to one which was more or less indistinguishable from a human voice. It might come across as cheesy or even campy today, but to me it's a signal that the computer was not intended to be considered fanciful. They were still doing a robotic computer voice in TMP. (A few years later for WarGames, Wood's voice was processed to sound robotic.) Having Majel do the computer in a natural voice in TNG was a signal that the Ent-D computer was "more advanced."
Right—giving the audience what they expect, or as a cue to the audience that "this is a machine." I've read that Lucas opted for vector graphics of the Death Star plans in Star Wars, although he had been shown raster graphics. He wanted to insure that audiences understood that they were looking at a computer sim. Didn't take long to supersede that threshold in reality.
Still, it's science fiction, and the creators can make the technology as advanced as they like. They gave the ship's computer a sultry, "bedroom" voice in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday."
From Quora https://www.quora.com/What-command-centers-have-taken-inspiration-from-the-Star-Trek-Bridge
What command centers have taken inspiration from the Star Trek Bridge?
Includes this interesting real world version https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-88dc6be467380bc3664ba431fe48c819.webp
What command centers have taken inspiration from the Star Trek Bridge?
Includes this interesting real world version https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-88dc6be467380bc3664ba431fe48c819.webp
I never suggested that there was ever a crisis, just that maybe 2260's humans prefer not to use AI for certain tasks that may seem more efficient to automate today.
Why would it be tired? Even today there is news of today's mere algorithms, which were designed to bring people more of what they ask for, being used instead to hype certain viewpoints or lead people to certain actions. If it can happen today, full-on intelligent AI at the levels we see in Star Trek could do things even worse. Until Kirk argues it to death...
I don't understand how this is a disagreement with me. "Manual" implies human, not computer, control to me, and it this station is "manually monitored" then some guy watches it all day. Realistically it might be a short watch, or be checked every 20 minutes by a crewman on a detail. But this room is one of the exact reasons I think that AI is limited, or has more human oversight above it, in TOS, perhaps even than in some fields today.
Not only is this a good point, but I'll expand on that an on a previous point of mine. In a world where computers could be used to simulate almost anything, and automate almost anything, it might be desirable to have the computer sound mechanical, just so that it is obvious that it is the computer talking.
The characters on Star Trek are doing duties on a mission; they are not middle-class consumers using a digital assistant and picking any voice that sounds pleasing. They need to know on the busy Bridge when a verbal output comes from the computer specifically, so that slightly inhuman voice would do the trick.
The physical buttons, mechanical computer voice, manual monitoring, blinky lights as opposed to touchscreens, and so on, in TOS all have one thing in common: they bring the needed info, and only the needed info, to the forefront for humans, while minimizing the computer's need to do anything other than what it absolutely must to keep the ship going. If they really were to spend five years away from almost all support, that would make sense in an energy-conservative sense.
I don’t think that’s accurate. They had to crunch to even get the graphics they got. I don’t believe it would have been possible to get rasterized 3D graphics of the sort necessary to illustrate the trench.
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