The Enterprise Computer vs Real Ai

[ZapBrannigan]

Today's Ai is designed to be deceptive, in customer service chats and voice calls. The computer voice on Kirk's bridge was clearly mechanical, and that was a good thing:

Perhaps Star Trek’s Computer Voice Makes Sense - NeuroLogica Blog

For many science fiction fans the computer voice on the Enterprise is iconic, and is, in fact, "the" voice of any computer. Majel Barrett deliberately gave the computer a stilted, monotone, mechanical voice to reflect the fact that it was a non-sentient machine. But also, it reflected the...

theness.com

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Today's Ai is designed to be deceptive, in customer service chats and voice calls. The computer voice on Kirk's bridge was clearly mechanical, and that was a good thing:

Perhaps Star Trek’s Computer Voice Makes Sense - NeuroLogica Blog

For many science fiction fans the computer voice on the Enterprise is iconic, and is, in fact, "the" voice of any computer. Majel Barrett deliberately gave the computer a stilted, monotone, mechanical voice to reflect the fact that it was a non-sentient machine. But also, it reflected the...

theness.com

I was going to mention Tomorrow is Yesterday "upgrading" the computer voice to sound more natural, but then I read the article and they bring it up. Babylon 5 also had a plot where the computer gets a more natural voice that annoys everyone until they turn it off, so it seems like that's a common explanation for the robotic computer voice. Though computers with true AI like Holly in Red Dwarf and the Andromeda Ascendant can just talk normally because they basically are people.

 

[Phaser Two]

I was going to mention Tomorrow is Yesterday "upgrading" the computer voice to sound more natural, but then I read the article and they bring it up. Babylon 5 also had a plot where the computer gets a more natural voice that annoys everyone until they turn it off, so it seems like that's a common explanation for the robotic computer voice. Though computers with true AI like Holly in Red Dwarf and the Andromeda Ascendant can just talk normally because they basically are people.

Well, sure, and then there's Data and the EMH. The EMH, in particular, had really evolved to be indistinguishable from a human by the end of Voyager.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Well, sure, and then there's Data and the EMH. The EMH, in particular, had really evolved to be indistinguishable from a human by the end of Voyager.

TV and sci-fi writers always want robots to be self-aware and sentient, because that's a character. Take Lost in Space: they started out pretty serious, but then they couldn't resist turning the Robot into a person. There was even a TNG episode where the ship's computer whipped up a fully sentient holodeck character (a Sherlock Holmes villain) just to satisfy a user prompt.

In real life, it looks like true consciousness is not a computational phenomenon, and it will not be coming to computers in the foreseeable future. But the simulating of personality and awareness keeps getting better. They just are not aware. My favorite illustration of this is a cartoon that went like:

USER: Is this mushroom safe to eat?

CHEERFUL AI: Yes!

USER: [Now seen as a headstone in the cemetery.]

CHEERFUL AI: You're right, that mushroom was poisonous. Would you like to know more about poisonous mushrooms?

 

[Hashy]

It's always about who is programming the system and for what purpose.

SkyNet AI killbots are programmed by the military to kill people.

Sales bots are programmed by companies to sell you more crap.

Chat GPT + Claude like bots are programmed by tech bros to go in circles so you waste your credits.

The ships computer is.. Programmed by starfleet to be the ships computer. It's programmed to serve people.

AI as a personality is an illusion. It's not a person. It can't think. It can't remember. It can't learn new things. It can't reason. It can't & never will be able to do thousands of things that make people what we are. This isn't a chauvinistic human thing; this technology simply isn't the same thing.

An Artificial intelligence is a clever computer program. i.e starships computer.
An Artificial Lifeform is an entirely different thing altogether. i.e data, the EMH.
It is not the same thing as AI.
AI will never 'evolve' into an artificial lifeform. It's a search engine. A tool.

Artificial Lifeforms will be engineered from the ground up. The architecture would be entirely different to the way LLMs/GenAI systems work today.
They are like basically every other computer programming system we currently use; they're hacks, cheats, tricks & shortcuts. It's the same way we go to space today: small light vehicles, long orbit interception trajectories. It's flimsy and practically a joke.
Come back in 150 years when we're doing direct flights to planets in days, & then we'll likely have the concept of an Artificial Lifeform resembling something like what we've been imagining.

For today, it's just people. i.e con-artists convincing you that they have an ability which they do not.
Also our technological advancement has been somewhat self deceptive on it's own. We think that technology has advanced a lot in the last 20 years, but it kind of hasn't. It's just being applied. But they're all technologies discovered in previous decades, things like LCD screens, LEDs, lithium batteries, transisitors, etc etc.. They're all things that came out of the period between the 1940s or there abouts & the 1980s.
Which is pretty sad to think about actually: I wonder if they just 'figured everything out' or just stopped funding actual technological development, OR if they realised that anything beyond that would just be too dangerous in the hands of the general public, so they keep it guarded.
I don't know & I'm not pretending to claim anything about that, but I just wonder sometimes.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

We think that technology has advanced a lot in the last 20 years, but it kind of hasn't. It's just being applied. But they're all technologies discovered in previous decades, things like LCD screens, LEDs, lithium batteries, transistors, etc etc.. They're all things that came out of the period between the 1940s or there abouts & the 1980s. Which is pretty sad to think about actually: I wonder if they just 'figured everything out' or just stopped funding actual technological development, OR if they realised that anything beyond that would just be too dangerous in the hands of the general public, so they keep it guarded.

It's like, redwood trees don't grow to the stratosphere. Technology development, portrayed as a graph, was flat for a long time, then it rose up more and more steeply, and now it might flatten out again and plateau because we're running into the laws of physics. It's an S-curve.

That next upward wave you implied might never come. Elon Musk thinks we won't ever find a sci-fi propulsion method (a fuel that weighs far less, packs more energy, but is still affordable).

It's more plausible that "artificial lifeform" computers could be invented, but per Richard Daystrom, it's going to need a whole new approach. I could buy your 150 year estimate for that.

 

[Metryq]

Ruk, remember the Old Ones.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Ruk, remember the Old Ones.

I forgot about that! Ruk was clear and specific about a sci-fi scenario that has become less far-fetched than ever. Right now we're trying to figure out if this week's "insider" warnings that Ai could kill all humans is a real thing, or some kind of psy op. An Anthropic researcher just resigned and said that Ai could kill us all within ten years. Now Ai CEO's are chiming in.

Anthropic CEO calls on AI industry to slow down tech race, drawing support from Elon Musk, Sam Altman

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's slowdown plea drew Elon Musk's support, but whistleblowers warn voluntary rules fall short as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna demands a kill switch.

www.foxnews.com

This old TV show is more relevant today than when they filmed it:

KIRK: Is it possible they built their machines too well, gave them pride and a desire to survive? Machines that wanted logic and order and found that frustrated by the illogical emotional creatures that built them?

RUK: Yes, the Old Ones. The ones who made us. They grew fearful of us. They began to turn us off.

KIRK: And isn't it Korby who's creating the same danger to you all over again? Unlike you, we humans are full of unpredictable emotions that logic cannot solve.

RUK: Yes. Yes, it had been so long ago, I had forgotten. The Old Ones here. The ones who made us, yes. Yes, it is still in my memory banks. It became necessary to destroy them. You are inconsistent. You cannot be programmed. You are inferior.

 

[Phaser Two]

I forgot about that! Ruk was clear and specific about a sci-fi scenario that has become less far-fetched than ever. Right now we're trying to figure out if this week's "insider" warnings that Ai could kill all humans is a real thing, or some kind of psy op. An Anthropic researcher just resigned and said that Ai could kill us all within ten years. Now Ai CEO's are chiming in.

Anthropic CEO calls on AI industry to slow down tech race, drawing support from Elon Musk, Sam Altman

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's slowdown plea drew Elon Musk's support, but whistleblowers warn voluntary rules fall short as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna demands a kill switch.

www.foxnews.com

This old TV show is more relevant today than when they filmed it:

KIRK: Is it possible they built their machines too well, gave them pride and a desire to survive? Machines that wanted logic and order and found that frustrated by the illogical emotional creatures that built them?

RUK: Yes, the Old Ones. The ones who made us. They grew fearful of us. They began to turn us off.

KIRK: And isn't it Korby who's creating the same danger to you all over again? Unlike you, we humans are full of unpredictable emotions that logic cannot solve.

RUK: Yes. Yes, it had been so long ago, I had forgotten. The Old Ones here. The ones who made us, yes. Yes, it is still in my memory banks. It became necessary to destroy them. You are inconsistent. You cannot be programmed. You are inferior.

First, psy op is a really good term. Either these declarants were all threatened very recently and very specifically by Skynet, or perhaps they're trying to get on the inevitable regulation train in order to have a seat at the table and hinder the guardrails to some extent from the inside. I mean, are we supposed to believe that they're all only just now realizing the substance of the dire warnings they're abruptly issuing? I'm also wondering why they don't, oh you know, stop it. Whatever the case, I'm sure their actions are more driven by money than anything else.

Second, great quote. Yeah, our 60-year-old favorite TV show is actually *gaining,* not losing relevance as time goes by. Next up is some sort of sustained and notorious effort at life prolongation from various billionaires (to the extent they haven't already launched it) and someone who's not a huge TOS fan hears about "Miri" and realizes that it was a bit of a warning.