• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

The rapid advance of AI/Robotics and Star Trek

Love the Dots from DISCO and SNW. Would love to see Star Wars style droids in Trek. Would also like to see more literal sentient computers like Zora or Zen from Blake's 7.
 
I have a problem placing Badgey in this category, and it's the same problem I have with the Doctor and any supposed sentient hologram. My problem is these all are just software. They are apps that run on a computer.

Before the mobile emitter, the Doctor was just a software program on Voyager. Take Voyager's computer apart or infect it with a virus, and the Doctor is also affected. The same holds for Moriarty or the idea that Barclay argued with Einstein in "The Nth Degree". It's not Moriarty. That wasn't Einstein. That was the ship's computer.

I'll accept Zora in this case. Zora was the embodiment of the ship's computer. M-5 was a separate entity that could access the computer. Data, Lore, and all the Soong type and descendant androids are their own independent entities.

So what? Every being is software in Trek including organics; O'Brien, Sisko, Kira, Dax, and Worf become "apps" running on the station's computer for a time. The Doctor and Moriarty are clearly discrete entities.

Badgey is a glorified ChatGPT.

No. B. is intended to be one (a holo tutor), but makes the decision to hate and try to murder Rutherford all by itself. It had unintentionally become a true, sentient (and mad) AI.
 
Whenever pre-mobile emitter The Doctor is "talking" to Voyager's computer, we are witnessing an amusing yet unnecessary simulation; The Doctor should be functioning at what computational speed is listed for said computer, because both are one and the same.
 
Trek looks absolutely archaic where real world technological progress is concerned.

Not really. Maybe the aesthetics look archaic in some instances but remember when Finny used Ai to change the video recording on the bridge to make Kirk look guilty???? 😂

Trek is an Alternate history to ours. Just like For All Mankind. It doesn't have to follow our tech advancements exactly. Too bad the current producers don't see it this way and have to constantly retcon stuff to try to match our history. (Khan for example... 😏)
 
Last edited:
The holodeck's ability to change details in such a precise manner borders on mind-reading; we've a ways to go before whatever we have gets that good.

Trek alis an Alternate history to ours. Just like For All Mankind. It doesn't have to follow our tech advancements exactly. Too bad the current producers don't see it this way and have to constantly retcon stuff to try to match our history. (Khan for example... 😏)

Thank you. They either are unaware of "alternative history fiction" or they believe that best way to stay thematically relevant is to be referentially relevant; it does not help that certain fans function as their enablers.
 
It was a buzzword (buzzacronym?) that caught on: nothing more, nothing less.
No. AI research has been going on for decades, and hardly any of it, if any at all, was about digital sentience. AI as a term was preempted by sci fi, not the other way around.

The term was invented by a computer scientist in the 1950's named John McCarthy.
 
No. AI research has been going on for decades, and hardly any of it, if any at all, was about digital sentience. AI as a term was preempted by sci fi, not the other way around.

The term was invented by a computer scientist in the 1950's named John McCarthy.

As it pertains to this nouveau "marketing movement"? Yes: it is designed to gin up interest (and a modicum of self-serving controversy, to boot).
 
As it pertains to this "marketing movement"? Yes: it is designed to gin up interest (and a modicum of controversy).
No. You don't get to redefine a thing because you don't like said thing or I would have turned the meaning of peaches into something so vile and horrible everyone reading this would weep and vomit at the same time and pray for forgetfulness of this day that will not come. Fuck peaches.
 
imagine if ai in the future is like the star trek universe
ZzFLPEcBZCtj3yuALs.webp
 
So what? Every being is software in Trek including organics; O'Brien, Sisko, Kira, Dax, and Worf become "apps" running on the station's computer for a time. The Doctor and Moriarty are clearly discrete entities.

By this logic, Sybil was really multiple, discrete entities inhabiting the same body and using the same brain.
 
It's not "AI".

With AI, voice recognition, and home assistants like Alexa, we’re basically at the point of the computer of the USS Enterprise being real.
Siri from a few years ago is infinitely closer to the Library Computer than ChatGPT/Claude/whatever's-in-vogue. LLMs are designed to produce human-like text output, whereas the LC is mission-critical software that has to be purely logical and deterministic. Frankly, I think Wolfram Alpha, which is NOT an LLM, is the closest we've got right now, and we've had that since 2010 or so.
 
Does this include the ability of a ship’s computer to autonomously cook up a theory of how to safely beam people into an alternate universe (TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”)?
This is a major problem.

What are the exact requirements to do this? Because I have been thinking recently of the problem of A. I...

I think that have a solution.

Back in the ancient days of the 1950s, an artist would record their piece of music twice. Each time it would be a little different. By overwriting the recording, the 'errors' coul be masked. Hence High Feldelity records.

Such that with an A. I., instead of looking at the individual bits, one looks at the overall "image".

Operationally what would result is a combined response, with no issues.

Modern Mainframe computers solve the program twice, then subtract the second from the first. If the answer is not zero, then an error has occurred...

Which means 'try again'.

I am not talking bit errors, but solution errors. Where Kirk onboard the ISS Enterprise asked the question, the computer came up with a workable solution. With the supplies on hand. So, instead of being told a story that isn't workable, the onboard computer told a correct story. Instead of a hallucinating the answer.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top