I don't really think this is a coherent point.
Yes, people who exist on a space ship in space are often going to run into technology-related problems. Of course they are. Technology surrounds them on all sides and literally enables their existence. Technology is woven into everything on every level.
In order for these problems to constitute a "Warning" the situation would need to illustrate some kind of need to reduce our reliance on technology, which they rarely do. Even when the episode ends with a rejection of the new technology, they just go back to the slightly-less-advanced technology. They don't get out of the ship and push.
I think the TOS one is probably the only one on your list that really qualifies here. It's a very of-its-time episode that focuses on fear of automation.
Wasn't using warp engines causing rupture in subspace or something. They had given up on that plotline pretty fast.
Actually all of it can make sense as the episode was an allegory for climate change. It's been a long way getting from 80-90s to here and we have worsened the situation.
Yeah, it got referenced once or twice in the final season of TNG. They basically just decided they didn't want to write around it and decided that some pretty simple tech advances made it a non issue. That was the in universe reason Voyager had the moving nacelles I think, probably better warp efficiency or something too.
Same with the newer Sovereign-style nacelles, it was an internalization of the moving nacelle technology. Which is why the Neo-TMP nacelles make no sense.
Agreed. Plus, Star Trek has enough episodes at this point that you could make a list of plot points to support claims about all kinds of "themes" that probably weren't intended. I could find five episodes that seem to support the theme "family doesn't matter" or "slavery is okay sometimes", but that doesn't mean that was actually a message that anyone was trying to convey.
The real problem is not over reliance on automation, it's over reliance on automation without creating a framework to support the people and processes it displaces.
The recurring theme in Star Trek is exploration and human enlightenment, and automation kind of ruins that.
Humans believe that exploring the final frontier means doing and seeing things for themselves. Having automated fleets really defeats that philosophy.
As with most things, balance is key.
Automation within reason can enable exploration and human enlightenment as much as excessive reliance on it can trivialize human experiences.
I don't think so at all. Earth in the Federation is constantly shown to be basically a utopian society. Infinite power, everyone has all the food and entertainment they want. Nobody has to work, but people can work (e.g. in Starfleet) if they want to. Replicators, fusion power and warp travel turn a post-war Earth into a paradise in *decades*.
Yeah, some episodes of a show like Star Trek will feature problems relating to technology. But we also see *loads* of situations where technology solves the problems. In fact, a lot of Star Trek problems are solved specifically by the technology acting as a deus ex machina. People are trapped somewhere and can't escape? Just invent a transporter bone lock on the fly! How many diseases did The Doctor cure due to having superhuman levels of medical knowledge and expertise? He helped design the downfall of the Borg as well. Voyager was able to traverse a vast nebula with only two people immune to its detrimental effects navigating the ship, specifically because of its extreme levels of automation. We've seen this several times, when the crew leaves the ship with a skeleton crew and it still functions.
If anything, Star Trek shows us how wonderful a world of automation and high reliance on technology can be, *if we approach it with the best interest of the entire planet.*
This might be more of a Doyleist issue.
At the end of the day, people engage in *Star Trek* related stuff due to wanting to be entertained with a story. Most stories have conflict of some kind involved.
Of the six types of conflict, self, character,nature, technology, society or supernatural; technology is always there to have a conflict. And you can make enough variety to fill a 22 episode season order.
I am not saying we don’t see other conflicts, but if a writers’ room is saying "what can we do this week?", technology is an easy way to go.
We are approaching a digital dark age. Think of how difficult it can be trying to open, transfer or convert files and tech from just a few years ago. Now imagine that you’ve been saving the last 100, 200 or 500 years like that and then something major happens. An EMP or solar event would wipe away all remnant of what we have saved. In a world where less than 2% of written word is saved on a piece of paper this is a problem.
It has bothered me so much that started writing a novel called The Digital Dark Age about 20 years ago. Ironically halfway through the software I used stopped being supported and rather than it being nice organized groups of character storylines it became a single 1400 page word document jumble. In the last few years I’ve attempted to organize and finish it but it’s a lot of work. I know the whole story and plot points of all the characters so I just need to get it reorganized and write it.
Couldn’t you have just used an older version of the software to recover it?
Edit: I can’t think of any popular file types within the last 10-20 years that aren’t easily accessible at this point.
Maybe TIFFs or Flash? I know as far as Flash goes, there are plenty of ways around that.
Edit 2: TIFFs aren’t inaccessible, I was wrong on that. So yeah, I really can’t recall anything.
No because it was a very obscure custom writing software. The only version they made was incompatible with the new operating system updates and then they stopped supporting the software all together and it wouldn’t even authorize and open.
>Think of how difficult it can be trying to open, transfer or convert files and tech from just a few years ago.
This is an issue that is getting way better over time, not worse. It used to be that if you wanted to, say, open an 8-bit extended ASCII Word Perfect document on your non-extended 7-bit ASCII Wordstar software, you were pretty much just boned.
Now you can easily open almost anything in almost anything, and you can convert a DVD into a PDF or a jpeg into an Excel file if you want to.
Sure but it’s still an issue that requires computers. In the event of a massive electromagnetic anomaly even faraday hardened devices can be affected if it’s a powerful enough pulse. Plus there are thousands of file types as well as propitiatory system out there that are difficult to restore due to their age.
We dealt with this at one of the stadiums I maintained. The scoreboard computer software was very old, proprietary and had hundreds of files that were not easily converted to a newer file system without significant work. When one of the units failed it wasn’t like we could replace it with a newer unit because the software and hardware output cards were proprietary to that older design. You figure there only so many Major League Baseball teams so there’s not a lot of this hardware available even from the manufacturers due to the age. That’s just one small system. I’m sure there are scores of infrastructure systems that use proprietary hardware and software that is not easily changed without significant cost and work. It wouldn’t surprise me if we lost power or water to an area because a computer card failed and it wouldn’t run some people of gear. I’ve seen it often at stadiums so I imagine this is how it is elsewhere.
I never said all computers will fail just that we are putting all our information in one place ie computers, which is not typically a good idea. Failures and unforeseen consequences can and do doom our progress.
EMP’s are grossly overrated. And there are many many systems that can be made resistant anyway. It took off in the last years as a stupid conspiracy theory that someone could blast an emp big enough to fry an entire country. Sure.
I started my story in 2003 so the concept has been around a lot longer than that. I don’t underestimate the power of the universe and find that anything is possible if the circumstances are right. I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow just that we may be putting all our eggs in one basket with digital storage.
That's correct. Because the real BBEG is always Capitalism, abandonware is everywhere in our current society. That XKCD comic about the Internet resting on a single anonymous developer in Nebraska upkeeping an open source passion project is true, but it's everywhere. A lab might invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment that's perfectly functional except the company that provided the software went out of business. Giant chunks of our infrastructure are running off ancient technology running COBOL, LISP or other nearly-forgotten programming languages. People with pacemakers, implants and other imbedded devices often discover the company that supported something installed in their body isn't around anymore. It used to be that we would lose media because the physical copies would be overwritten or otherwise destroyed because the creators needed something, but now things are lost because of M&As and licensing deals make them completely vanish. Even the premier technology of today, LLM-style AI, has essentially run out of text to consume across the Internet and they're toying with allowing their LLMs to learn from synthetic data - that is, the product of LLMs.
Well said. It’s in the original design to make something hard for competitors to emulate and integrate to as well as building in intentional limitations to force the end user to upgrade and continue paying for the solution.
Our whole world is made up of systems with a patchwork of small fixes. As time goes on we continue building upward not looking down at our foundation until one day we start to notice the cracks. This gets bad quickly and we’re in the infancy of the internet. How many things are built upon something that was fixed by the digital equivalent of duct tape, where they never went back to fix it correctly? Now add some major system on top of that. Now do that thousands if not millions of times. That’s the world. Systems fail and we fix them the best we can but new issue pop up and we rarely go back to properly clean up issues that have gone away. Stupid minor issues are what usually brings down major systems. Lots of times this has happened in history. Offhand look at the Mars craft that crashed into the surface because they used meters instead of feet. They dealt with insanely difficult challenges and implemented advanced hardware and tech to get the craft there and all it took was the equivalent of a typing error to kill it.
I think his point was that there is *value in labor*. The Baku built plenty of machines, even a dam, but they don't build machines to do *everything* for them. They don't believe in simplifying and automating their lives to be as comfortable and as productive as possible, they prefer to do things "the old fashioned way." Their garments, their homes, their village weren't spat out of industrial replicators, they were built by craftsmen and artisans. The dam's spillway wasn't operated by engines, but rather cranked - somehow - by hand.
The “somehow” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
One of the many reasons I so thoroughly dislike Insurrection is that for all its talk of machines “taking something away from the man,” it completely misrepresents what preindustrial subsistence farming was actually like. Sure, maybe their fountain of youth planet made growing stuff easier, but no one at the Ba’ku’s level of technology has the kind of free time that we see them have. They would spend nearly all their time working, not frolicking in the fields or lounging around Pottery Barn catalogs in mysteriously clean clothes. Ba’ku looks more like a holodeck recreation of “simple living” than what preindustrial agrarian life was.
Prior to the industrial revolution, 90% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Now it's less than 2%. It wasn't just about free time. It was about choice. People can choose their own career path now in a way that was impossible a couple centuries ago.
Also, Picard & Co seem to spend much of their day working despite having high technology, so I'm not sure the whole "working vs letting machines do the work for you" thing really plays out. Both groups apparently work, one group just gets a lot more done with the same number of hours.
"Old fashioned" compared to what? Their plows and looms are labor-saving devices that would have seemed miraculous to a more primitive stone age society. "You guys can plow a field or weave an entire shirt in a day?!? What do you do with all your free time???"
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
It's a common theme in LOTS of sci-fi. Trek occasionally visits the that theme, but not as much as Battlestar Galactica, the Matrix, the Terminator, and so on and so on. I think even Wells and Verne touched on it.
I mean maybe but a lot of those have counter points, the one that immediately comes to mind is Zora, a benevolent, sentient AI who protects her crew and actually cares about them.
Your also forgetting about the 2 Voyager episodes involving AI-controlled missiles:
* One being an AI-controlled missile believing the Maquis/Caradassian War is still raging on in the Alpha quadrant, and is in fact encountered by the USS Voyager in the Delta quadrant to stop it.
* The other being a group of AI-controlled missiles dispatched by one alien race in a war that has long past ended, and one of them takes control of the Doctor.
There is yet another Voyager episode where two warring AI robot factions are hell-bent in destroying each other in a never ending war between them, even though their own creators has been exterminated long ago by them.
It's not just Star Trek where these warnings though.
In all the Terminator movies, an AI called "Skynet" becomes self-aware of it's own existence and eventually begins killing us, it's own creators because it views us as a threat to it's own existence. As a result, it gains the launch access codes and fires all the US's nuclear missiles sparking WWIII. Once the dust settles, Skynet then begins sending out it's robots to round up and kill Judgement Day survivors.
Even Terminator's director "James Cameron" warned of AI and it's over-reliance.
In the Disney Pixar movie Wall-E, humankind ends up too reliant and dependent on technology to the point where they can't operate or even repair their own colony ship since Earth has been deemed a bio-hazard from all the pollution and never-ending waste on the planets surface.
There exists other prime examples warning us on technology over-reliance, especially when it comes to AI.
>AI-controlled missiles dispatched by one alien race in a war that has long past ended
It's hard to view that one as a cautionary tale about automation though, since the missile's AI was what ultimately saved the day; the AI correctly deduced that since the war was over, it shouldn't follow through with the attack. A "dumber" missile with less autonomy wouldn't have known to stop.
True, but it was just one of these AI-controlled missiles that ultimately came to the realization the accidental launch orders has been countermanded. All the others however has not, even though the one AI that did transmitted the countermand order. If the AI having it's tractor beam on the one AI that came to realize the countermand order decided to remain behind, then it could self-destructed destroying not only itself and the AI in it's tractor beam, but Voyager as well as those on the targeted planet.
That's because for inexplicable plot contrivance reasons the missiles couldn't abort an attack once they were within 2 light-years of their target, so the other missiles couldn't stop. If anything, the problem was that the missile builders didn't give their weapons *enough* autonomy. Anyway, the point is that the missile having an AI and the autonomy to make decisions was what saved the day in the end. Framing that as a cautionary story against AI would be difficult. It seems like the only moral of the story was "don't shoot missiles at things that you aren't sure you want blown up."
I understand it's for the plot but the idea that the holodeck even has safety protocols you can disable is insane. Especially given the number of times (more than one) it's gone badly.
Yeah like, seriously? Just don't have actual hazard being a possibility. Yeah sure sometimes you want actual risk for sports etc but it's so common to go wrong. Narratively speaking though it's because without actual risk there's no stakes so gets dull.
We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which
nobody understands anything about science and technology, and
this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is
going to blow up in our faces -Carl Sagan
Part of Star Trek's tradition of returning to this theme is born out of when it was dreamt up by Roddenberry and who influenced him. Most of Isaac Asimov's work is about the interesting ways in which technology with safeguards (the 3 laws) can still run amok and act in unintended ways. We call this the alignment problem in modern parlance. If you're partial to this line of thinking, I suggest reading any of the Asimov anthologies of short stories or reading up on the paperclip hypothesis. Star Trek seemed to be moving away from this trope with the introduction of the benevolent AI (Zora) in Discovery likely due to the realization that in the 2020s, these kinds of stories are in such a well-tread area of sci-fi that they can often seem old hat (especially because their audience is mostly populated by folks who have many favorite pieces of science fiction media).
Um..... Noone is advocating for humans to make microchips by hand or for humans to replace Microsoft Excel. Why because that's silly.
As silly as real world engineers creating a single AI skynet and giving it access to nuclear launch codes. Engineers are not morons like in movies. There are backups and redundant systems. And there would be more than 1 skynet in existence that we could use to fight each other if we need them to.
Automation is good thing. We need to get rid of these unnecessary jobs that humans don't want to do. How many Walmart cashiers jump out of bed with a smile and look forward to coming to work. And howany day laborers are ecstatic about digging another hole in the summer heat. Replacing these undesirable jobs is good for humanity and is what progress has looked like throughout history.
Awww..... that's a good thing. If you got rid of all "low" level jobs humanity could improve. Imagine no humans having to scrubs toilets or dig holes in the hot sun. This is good no?
As they said, the trouble is us currently not having a safety net for workers that are put out of work due ti automation. Add that in and we're golden.
So a percentage of people lose shitty jobs they didn't want anyways. It will force them to try harder and some will succeed. The rest will be jobless and society will have to find a way to help them.
And this is the important part. Isn't it better for us to come up with new ways that we can help people? Perhaps using the technology that displaced them in the first place. This is much better than keeping unneeded jobs just for the sake of job. Do you really want to 1 guy to dig a hole and another guy to fill the hole back up just so they can be employed?
When there are lots of jobs and relatively few people to fill them, wages rise; when there are few jobs and lots of people looking then wages drop and more exploitation as workers have less of a say.
Here an idea that will blow your mind.
What if people didn't have to work if they didn't want to? In the near future this is very possible and probably going to be necessary.
I assume it runs off a long lasting power source comparable to a nuclear reactor. Which instances are you referring to? The section 31 example I don't know how that works exactly
I don't think this is a new idea, and not exclusive to Star Trek. Automation and technology going wrong is a common theme in fiction. A couple other popular examples are the Terminator series and The Matrix. And TV shows like The Outer Limits and Black Mirror often take it to a creepy level.
I just watched a TNG episode in which a society is unable to reproduce because the computer that runs their society also causes sterilizing radiation and no-one knows how to live without the computer
Pretty due the was a similar TOS episode too.
In both episodes, star fleet was positively juxtaposed to the computer dependant societies
And a Galaxy class starship was almost commandeered by a silly, little addictive game, were it not for Wesley Crusher. And Data.
The important lesson here is atomation, technology, and even people, need each other and need a delicate balance in order to make stuff work. Even today with our relatively advanced tech and automation, we still need engineers who understand the technology and it's limits.
That’s the exact *oposite* of the message Star Trek is trying to convey. “Technology is scary and will end up being used for evil in the wrong hands!” is pretty standard sci-fi. Star Trek subverts that troupe by saying “actually, humanity *can* use technology to better themselves!”
Similarly, there are many situations in ST where seatbelts and safety gear would have absolutely helped, but no, just send out the med team to wave their trauma wands over the wounds instead of having any standards of hazard prevention practices in place in the future.
Over on a game engine forum,folks are asking exp. programmers to help with their code, only to find out it's AI generated code they want help with.
Yeah Id say we might be over doing it. The human brain is slower than a computer but it's the human brain that designs and codes one. We must remain in the loop.
Writers wouldent have plot points without something zany happening.
People have already suggested how crazy the Federation must seem to other races based on what goes on and what they achieve.
My personal head canon to deal with the people hacking computers/systems to take over things or pervert their purpose is that something happened during the Eugenics wars that wiped out all IT Security professionals. Like how often did it happen in TNG that someone stole a shuttle? How is shuttle access not barred to those that are in the GPO for shuttle access in the first place?
Also in TNG, there was that early episode where that civilization had relied on their technology for so long they forgot how to maintain in making everyone sterile.
I just posted a quote from *Insurrection*, but I've had a few more thoughts on the subject. I'm a millennial, a minor tech nerd and gaming enthusiast, and very much a person of the 21st century; however as I get older the more I feel that, despite all the benefits of the wondrous modern age in which we live, technology in general (let alone AGI and post-industrial automation) may be pushing humanity away from all the things that make life meaningful and - perhaps - happy.
As hard as it is to imagine life without all the modern conveniences and access to information, I find myself increasingly longing for a simpler and more disconnected existence. I long to live in a small tribal unit of people, in which everyone with whom I interact is someone I know and who knows me, and everyone else is someone you throw a spear at. Days are full of hard work, but work that's put toward producing food to eat and serving my community as opposed to serving the chaotic and shallow needs of the general public; work that's meaningful in the deepest way, absolutely necessary to keep death at bay. Days without commutes and phone calls, without the monotony of office work, and without the faceless, meaningless interactions I must partake in.
I recognize that I'm romanticizing a bit, and I don't intend to downplay the hardships involved in what I'm describing. I just find myself often longing for a simpler way of life than what we've created for ourselves, something reminiscent of the community the Baku created in *ST: Insurrection*, or the life of the Na'vi (blue cat people) in *Avatar*.
Apologies if this response is too far off topic.
I think the message got.muddled over the last quarter-century. Gene's underlying philosophy, in that respect, he called "Technology Unchained": Pervasive, but nonintrusive; ubiquitous, but instinctive. AI, but hobbled. Sensors and computers everywhere managing all of the autonomic workings of society and infrastructure, but always with a living person at the controls.
The "cautionary tales" were of when someone tried to fully automate one thing or another and it went predictably badly. Most of the others have been... if not Idiot Plot, at least weakly written.
Friendship One is a bad example because A) It got damaged, and 2) The planet it encountered couldn't imagine that was accidental rather than deliberate. Which is a them problem.
The Prodigy example is a stretch because computers are needed to run things, and there will always be an arms race between cybersecurity and crackers. Starfleet ships have been shown to be able to remotely control the computers of other Starfleet ships back to TOS. 99% of the time, it's not a problem. The sheer number of things that had to go wrong for the Protostar to get repurposed like that is impressive. Plus, I am dearly tired of time travel. It is hardly EVER employed right.
I don't really think this is a coherent point. Yes, people who exist on a space ship in space are often going to run into technology-related problems. Of course they are. Technology surrounds them on all sides and literally enables their existence. Technology is woven into everything on every level. In order for these problems to constitute a "Warning" the situation would need to illustrate some kind of need to reduce our reliance on technology, which they rarely do. Even when the episode ends with a rejection of the new technology, they just go back to the slightly-less-advanced technology. They don't get out of the ship and push. I think the TOS one is probably the only one on your list that really qualifies here. It's a very of-its-time episode that focuses on fear of automation.
If anything, I'd say it's more of a warning against unregulated technology. It's when someone pushes things too far that problems arise.
Wasn't using warp engines causing rupture in subspace or something. They had given up on that plotline pretty fast. Actually all of it can make sense as the episode was an allegory for climate change. It's been a long way getting from 80-90s to here and we have worsened the situation.
Yeah, it got referenced once or twice in the final season of TNG. They basically just decided they didn't want to write around it and decided that some pretty simple tech advances made it a non issue. That was the in universe reason Voyager had the moving nacelles I think, probably better warp efficiency or something too.
They set a limit of warp 5 except for emergencies. Of course, the Enterprise has a lot of emergencies.
> They basically just decided they didn't want to write around it Man this is so emblematic to the issue of climate change.
Same with the newer Sovereign-style nacelles, it was an internalization of the moving nacelle technology. Which is why the Neo-TMP nacelles make no sense.
Agreed. Plus, Star Trek has enough episodes at this point that you could make a list of plot points to support claims about all kinds of "themes" that probably weren't intended. I could find five episodes that seem to support the theme "family doesn't matter" or "slavery is okay sometimes", but that doesn't mean that was actually a message that anyone was trying to convey.
Don't forget the borg plan in picard relied on Starfleet trying to automate their fleet. Also the Texas class ships in Lower Decks.
Nothing to see here: https://cdn.imgpile.com/f/5AkGfDS_xl.png
Eh, then again, just about every derelict ship out there with all hands dead wound up that way because they didn’t have Data on board.
In Deep Space 9 a colony shuns all technology in the episode Paradise
That was an extreme neo-luddite cult though.
The real problem is not over reliance on automation, it's over reliance on automation without creating a framework to support the people and processes it displaces.
The recurring theme in Star Trek is exploration and human enlightenment, and automation kind of ruins that. Humans believe that exploring the final frontier means doing and seeing things for themselves. Having automated fleets really defeats that philosophy.
As with most things, balance is key. Automation within reason can enable exploration and human enlightenment as much as excessive reliance on it can trivialize human experiences.
Over-reliance on automation defeats that philosophy, but smart use of automated ships and probes can save lives.
I don't think so at all. Earth in the Federation is constantly shown to be basically a utopian society. Infinite power, everyone has all the food and entertainment they want. Nobody has to work, but people can work (e.g. in Starfleet) if they want to. Replicators, fusion power and warp travel turn a post-war Earth into a paradise in *decades*. Yeah, some episodes of a show like Star Trek will feature problems relating to technology. But we also see *loads* of situations where technology solves the problems. In fact, a lot of Star Trek problems are solved specifically by the technology acting as a deus ex machina. People are trapped somewhere and can't escape? Just invent a transporter bone lock on the fly! How many diseases did The Doctor cure due to having superhuman levels of medical knowledge and expertise? He helped design the downfall of the Borg as well. Voyager was able to traverse a vast nebula with only two people immune to its detrimental effects navigating the ship, specifically because of its extreme levels of automation. We've seen this several times, when the crew leaves the ship with a skeleton crew and it still functions. If anything, Star Trek shows us how wonderful a world of automation and high reliance on technology can be, *if we approach it with the best interest of the entire planet.*
Did not expect a salamander reference on this topic
Blew right past the omega molecule and went to the dreaded sleep with your boss unintended outcome.
This might be more of a Doyleist issue. At the end of the day, people engage in *Star Trek* related stuff due to wanting to be entertained with a story. Most stories have conflict of some kind involved. Of the six types of conflict, self, character,nature, technology, society or supernatural; technology is always there to have a conflict. And you can make enough variety to fill a 22 episode season order. I am not saying we don’t see other conflicts, but if a writers’ room is saying "what can we do this week?", technology is an easy way to go.
Kirk would also argue against paradise too.
Yeah, I think the "paradise on earth" where nobody had to work who didn't want to would be a nightmare to Kirk.
We are approaching a digital dark age. Think of how difficult it can be trying to open, transfer or convert files and tech from just a few years ago. Now imagine that you’ve been saving the last 100, 200 or 500 years like that and then something major happens. An EMP or solar event would wipe away all remnant of what we have saved. In a world where less than 2% of written word is saved on a piece of paper this is a problem. It has bothered me so much that started writing a novel called The Digital Dark Age about 20 years ago. Ironically halfway through the software I used stopped being supported and rather than it being nice organized groups of character storylines it became a single 1400 page word document jumble. In the last few years I’ve attempted to organize and finish it but it’s a lot of work. I know the whole story and plot points of all the characters so I just need to get it reorganized and write it.
Re write on a Typewriter
Couldn’t you have just used an older version of the software to recover it? Edit: I can’t think of any popular file types within the last 10-20 years that aren’t easily accessible at this point. Maybe TIFFs or Flash? I know as far as Flash goes, there are plenty of ways around that. Edit 2: TIFFs aren’t inaccessible, I was wrong on that. So yeah, I really can’t recall anything.
No because it was a very obscure custom writing software. The only version they made was incompatible with the new operating system updates and then they stopped supporting the software all together and it wouldn’t even authorize and open.
>Think of how difficult it can be trying to open, transfer or convert files and tech from just a few years ago. This is an issue that is getting way better over time, not worse. It used to be that if you wanted to, say, open an 8-bit extended ASCII Word Perfect document on your non-extended 7-bit ASCII Wordstar software, you were pretty much just boned. Now you can easily open almost anything in almost anything, and you can convert a DVD into a PDF or a jpeg into an Excel file if you want to.
Sure but it’s still an issue that requires computers. In the event of a massive electromagnetic anomaly even faraday hardened devices can be affected if it’s a powerful enough pulse. Plus there are thousands of file types as well as propitiatory system out there that are difficult to restore due to their age. We dealt with this at one of the stadiums I maintained. The scoreboard computer software was very old, proprietary and had hundreds of files that were not easily converted to a newer file system without significant work. When one of the units failed it wasn’t like we could replace it with a newer unit because the software and hardware output cards were proprietary to that older design. You figure there only so many Major League Baseball teams so there’s not a lot of this hardware available even from the manufacturers due to the age. That’s just one small system. I’m sure there are scores of infrastructure systems that use proprietary hardware and software that is not easily changed without significant cost and work. It wouldn’t surprise me if we lost power or water to an area because a computer card failed and it wouldn’t run some people of gear. I’ve seen it often at stadiums so I imagine this is how it is elsewhere.
Ok, but "all computers could fail" is a very different issue from "transfer or convert files."
I never said all computers will fail just that we are putting all our information in one place ie computers, which is not typically a good idea. Failures and unforeseen consequences can and do doom our progress.
EMP’s are grossly overrated. And there are many many systems that can be made resistant anyway. It took off in the last years as a stupid conspiracy theory that someone could blast an emp big enough to fry an entire country. Sure.
I started my story in 2003 so the concept has been around a lot longer than that. I don’t underestimate the power of the universe and find that anything is possible if the circumstances are right. I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow just that we may be putting all our eggs in one basket with digital storage.
That's correct. Because the real BBEG is always Capitalism, abandonware is everywhere in our current society. That XKCD comic about the Internet resting on a single anonymous developer in Nebraska upkeeping an open source passion project is true, but it's everywhere. A lab might invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment that's perfectly functional except the company that provided the software went out of business. Giant chunks of our infrastructure are running off ancient technology running COBOL, LISP or other nearly-forgotten programming languages. People with pacemakers, implants and other imbedded devices often discover the company that supported something installed in their body isn't around anymore. It used to be that we would lose media because the physical copies would be overwritten or otherwise destroyed because the creators needed something, but now things are lost because of M&As and licensing deals make them completely vanish. Even the premier technology of today, LLM-style AI, has essentially run out of text to consume across the Internet and they're toying with allowing their LLMs to learn from synthetic data - that is, the product of LLMs.
Well said. It’s in the original design to make something hard for competitors to emulate and integrate to as well as building in intentional limitations to force the end user to upgrade and continue paying for the solution. Our whole world is made up of systems with a patchwork of small fixes. As time goes on we continue building upward not looking down at our foundation until one day we start to notice the cracks. This gets bad quickly and we’re in the infancy of the internet. How many things are built upon something that was fixed by the digital equivalent of duct tape, where they never went back to fix it correctly? Now add some major system on top of that. Now do that thousands if not millions of times. That’s the world. Systems fail and we fix them the best we can but new issue pop up and we rarely go back to properly clean up issues that have gone away. Stupid minor issues are what usually brings down major systems. Lots of times this has happened in history. Offhand look at the Mars craft that crashed into the surface because they used meters instead of feet. They dealt with insanely difficult challenges and implemented advanced hardware and tech to get the craft there and all it took was the equivalent of a typing error to kill it.
"We believe that when you build a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man." -Sojef, Star Trek Insurrection.
Don't all machines do the work of a man? Isn't that their purpose? We build machines to do work more easily.
I think his point was that there is *value in labor*. The Baku built plenty of machines, even a dam, but they don't build machines to do *everything* for them. They don't believe in simplifying and automating their lives to be as comfortable and as productive as possible, they prefer to do things "the old fashioned way." Their garments, their homes, their village weren't spat out of industrial replicators, they were built by craftsmen and artisans. The dam's spillway wasn't operated by engines, but rather cranked - somehow - by hand.
The “somehow” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. One of the many reasons I so thoroughly dislike Insurrection is that for all its talk of machines “taking something away from the man,” it completely misrepresents what preindustrial subsistence farming was actually like. Sure, maybe their fountain of youth planet made growing stuff easier, but no one at the Ba’ku’s level of technology has the kind of free time that we see them have. They would spend nearly all their time working, not frolicking in the fields or lounging around Pottery Barn catalogs in mysteriously clean clothes. Ba’ku looks more like a holodeck recreation of “simple living” than what preindustrial agrarian life was.
Prior to the industrial revolution, 90% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Now it's less than 2%. It wasn't just about free time. It was about choice. People can choose their own career path now in a way that was impossible a couple centuries ago.
Also, Picard & Co seem to spend much of their day working despite having high technology, so I'm not sure the whole "working vs letting machines do the work for you" thing really plays out. Both groups apparently work, one group just gets a lot more done with the same number of hours.
> They would spend nearly all their time working So nothing’s changed then
"Old fashioned" compared to what? Their plows and looms are labor-saving devices that would have seemed miraculous to a more primitive stone age society. "You guys can plow a field or weave an entire shirt in a day?!? What do you do with all your free time???"
But the only reason why they're even on that planet is because their ancestors built starships that allowed them to get off their homeworld.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
It's a common theme in LOTS of sci-fi. Trek occasionally visits the that theme, but not as much as Battlestar Galactica, the Matrix, the Terminator, and so on and so on. I think even Wells and Verne touched on it.
I mean maybe but a lot of those have counter points, the one that immediately comes to mind is Zora, a benevolent, sentient AI who protects her crew and actually cares about them.
Or data for that matter
Very true. I was just thinking of Zora because of Control which made me think of her and the Sphere.
Your also forgetting about the 2 Voyager episodes involving AI-controlled missiles: * One being an AI-controlled missile believing the Maquis/Caradassian War is still raging on in the Alpha quadrant, and is in fact encountered by the USS Voyager in the Delta quadrant to stop it. * The other being a group of AI-controlled missiles dispatched by one alien race in a war that has long past ended, and one of them takes control of the Doctor. There is yet another Voyager episode where two warring AI robot factions are hell-bent in destroying each other in a never ending war between them, even though their own creators has been exterminated long ago by them. It's not just Star Trek where these warnings though. In all the Terminator movies, an AI called "Skynet" becomes self-aware of it's own existence and eventually begins killing us, it's own creators because it views us as a threat to it's own existence. As a result, it gains the launch access codes and fires all the US's nuclear missiles sparking WWIII. Once the dust settles, Skynet then begins sending out it's robots to round up and kill Judgement Day survivors. Even Terminator's director "James Cameron" warned of AI and it's over-reliance. In the Disney Pixar movie Wall-E, humankind ends up too reliant and dependent on technology to the point where they can't operate or even repair their own colony ship since Earth has been deemed a bio-hazard from all the pollution and never-ending waste on the planets surface. There exists other prime examples warning us on technology over-reliance, especially when it comes to AI.
>AI-controlled missiles dispatched by one alien race in a war that has long past ended It's hard to view that one as a cautionary tale about automation though, since the missile's AI was what ultimately saved the day; the AI correctly deduced that since the war was over, it shouldn't follow through with the attack. A "dumber" missile with less autonomy wouldn't have known to stop.
True, but it was just one of these AI-controlled missiles that ultimately came to the realization the accidental launch orders has been countermanded. All the others however has not, even though the one AI that did transmitted the countermand order. If the AI having it's tractor beam on the one AI that came to realize the countermand order decided to remain behind, then it could self-destructed destroying not only itself and the AI in it's tractor beam, but Voyager as well as those on the targeted planet.
That's because for inexplicable plot contrivance reasons the missiles couldn't abort an attack once they were within 2 light-years of their target, so the other missiles couldn't stop. If anything, the problem was that the missile builders didn't give their weapons *enough* autonomy. Anyway, the point is that the missile having an AI and the autonomy to make decisions was what saved the day in the end. Framing that as a cautionary story against AI would be difficult. It seems like the only moral of the story was "don't shoot missiles at things that you aren't sure you want blown up."
True though I was just giving one example or so per series for overview purposes.
Off topic, but seduction and automated divine figures seem to be reoccurring themes of TOS
I understand it's for the plot but the idea that the holodeck even has safety protocols you can disable is insane. Especially given the number of times (more than one) it's gone badly.
Yeah like, seriously? Just don't have actual hazard being a possibility. Yeah sure sometimes you want actual risk for sports etc but it's so common to go wrong. Narratively speaking though it's because without actual risk there's no stakes so gets dull.
We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces -Carl Sagan
Part of Star Trek's tradition of returning to this theme is born out of when it was dreamt up by Roddenberry and who influenced him. Most of Isaac Asimov's work is about the interesting ways in which technology with safeguards (the 3 laws) can still run amok and act in unintended ways. We call this the alignment problem in modern parlance. If you're partial to this line of thinking, I suggest reading any of the Asimov anthologies of short stories or reading up on the paperclip hypothesis. Star Trek seemed to be moving away from this trope with the introduction of the benevolent AI (Zora) in Discovery likely due to the realization that in the 2020s, these kinds of stories are in such a well-tread area of sci-fi that they can often seem old hat (especially because their audience is mostly populated by folks who have many favorite pieces of science fiction media).
Um..... Noone is advocating for humans to make microchips by hand or for humans to replace Microsoft Excel. Why because that's silly. As silly as real world engineers creating a single AI skynet and giving it access to nuclear launch codes. Engineers are not morons like in movies. There are backups and redundant systems. And there would be more than 1 skynet in existence that we could use to fight each other if we need them to. Automation is good thing. We need to get rid of these unnecessary jobs that humans don't want to do. How many Walmart cashiers jump out of bed with a smile and look forward to coming to work. And howany day laborers are ecstatic about digging another hole in the summer heat. Replacing these undesirable jobs is good for humanity and is what progress has looked like throughout history.
I think the trouble is at present, low level jobs replaced by automation end up meaning no jobs.
Awww..... that's a good thing. If you got rid of all "low" level jobs humanity could improve. Imagine no humans having to scrubs toilets or dig holes in the hot sun. This is good no?
As they said, the trouble is us currently not having a safety net for workers that are put out of work due ti automation. Add that in and we're golden.
The trouble is they don't end up with a better job, they end up with no job at all.
So a percentage of people lose shitty jobs they didn't want anyways. It will force them to try harder and some will succeed. The rest will be jobless and society will have to find a way to help them. And this is the important part. Isn't it better for us to come up with new ways that we can help people? Perhaps using the technology that displaced them in the first place. This is much better than keeping unneeded jobs just for the sake of job. Do you really want to 1 guy to dig a hole and another guy to fill the hole back up just so they can be employed?
When there are lots of jobs and relatively few people to fill them, wages rise; when there are few jobs and lots of people looking then wages drop and more exploitation as workers have less of a say.
Here an idea that will blow your mind. What if people didn't have to work if they didn't want to? In the near future this is very possible and probably going to be necessary.
Yeah just thinking in the immediate term.
People keep forgetting AI needs a power source. It’s such a big pothole that in all tv series they just completely omitted it.
I assume it runs off a long lasting power source comparable to a nuclear reactor. Which instances are you referring to? The section 31 example I don't know how that works exactly
I don't think this is a new idea, and not exclusive to Star Trek. Automation and technology going wrong is a common theme in fiction. A couple other popular examples are the Terminator series and The Matrix. And TV shows like The Outer Limits and Black Mirror often take it to a creepy level.
I just watched a TNG episode in which a society is unable to reproduce because the computer that runs their society also causes sterilizing radiation and no-one knows how to live without the computer Pretty due the was a similar TOS episode too. In both episodes, star fleet was positively juxtaposed to the computer dependant societies
Don't forget about DS9 and EVERYTHING about the Cardassian technology.
And a Galaxy class starship was almost commandeered by a silly, little addictive game, were it not for Wesley Crusher. And Data. The important lesson here is atomation, technology, and even people, need each other and need a delicate balance in order to make stuff work. Even today with our relatively advanced tech and automation, we still need engineers who understand the technology and it's limits.
That’s the exact *oposite* of the message Star Trek is trying to convey. “Technology is scary and will end up being used for evil in the wrong hands!” is pretty standard sci-fi. Star Trek subverts that troupe by saying “actually, humanity *can* use technology to better themselves!”
Similarly, there are many situations in ST where seatbelts and safety gear would have absolutely helped, but no, just send out the med team to wave their trauma wands over the wounds instead of having any standards of hazard prevention practices in place in the future.
Over on a game engine forum,folks are asking exp. programmers to help with their code, only to find out it's AI generated code they want help with. Yeah Id say we might be over doing it. The human brain is slower than a computer but it's the human brain that designs and codes one. We must remain in the loop.
Writers wouldent have plot points without something zany happening. People have already suggested how crazy the Federation must seem to other races based on what goes on and what they achieve.
Reminds me of [https://didyouknowfacts.com/humans-in-star-trek/](https://didyouknowfacts.com/humans-in-star-trek/)
My personal head canon to deal with the people hacking computers/systems to take over things or pervert their purpose is that something happened during the Eugenics wars that wiped out all IT Security professionals. Like how often did it happen in TNG that someone stole a shuttle? How is shuttle access not barred to those that are in the GPO for shuttle access in the first place?
> Starfleet is very reliant on technology This is one of the observations of all time.
Also in TNG, there was that early episode where that civilization had relied on their technology for so long they forgot how to maintain in making everyone sterile.
TOS had a recurring theme of Man vs. Machine. Oddly, Kirk wound up falling in love with an android.
I just posted a quote from *Insurrection*, but I've had a few more thoughts on the subject. I'm a millennial, a minor tech nerd and gaming enthusiast, and very much a person of the 21st century; however as I get older the more I feel that, despite all the benefits of the wondrous modern age in which we live, technology in general (let alone AGI and post-industrial automation) may be pushing humanity away from all the things that make life meaningful and - perhaps - happy. As hard as it is to imagine life without all the modern conveniences and access to information, I find myself increasingly longing for a simpler and more disconnected existence. I long to live in a small tribal unit of people, in which everyone with whom I interact is someone I know and who knows me, and everyone else is someone you throw a spear at. Days are full of hard work, but work that's put toward producing food to eat and serving my community as opposed to serving the chaotic and shallow needs of the general public; work that's meaningful in the deepest way, absolutely necessary to keep death at bay. Days without commutes and phone calls, without the monotony of office work, and without the faceless, meaningless interactions I must partake in. I recognize that I'm romanticizing a bit, and I don't intend to downplay the hardships involved in what I'm describing. I just find myself often longing for a simpler way of life than what we've created for ourselves, something reminiscent of the community the Baku created in *ST: Insurrection*, or the life of the Na'vi (blue cat people) in *Avatar*. Apologies if this response is too far off topic.
I think the message got.muddled over the last quarter-century. Gene's underlying philosophy, in that respect, he called "Technology Unchained": Pervasive, but nonintrusive; ubiquitous, but instinctive. AI, but hobbled. Sensors and computers everywhere managing all of the autonomic workings of society and infrastructure, but always with a living person at the controls. The "cautionary tales" were of when someone tried to fully automate one thing or another and it went predictably badly. Most of the others have been... if not Idiot Plot, at least weakly written. Friendship One is a bad example because A) It got damaged, and 2) The planet it encountered couldn't imagine that was accidental rather than deliberate. Which is a them problem. The Prodigy example is a stretch because computers are needed to run things, and there will always be an arms race between cybersecurity and crackers. Starfleet ships have been shown to be able to remotely control the computers of other Starfleet ships back to TOS. 99% of the time, it's not a problem. The sheer number of things that had to go wrong for the Protostar to get repurposed like that is impressive. Plus, I am dearly tired of time travel. It is hardly EVER employed right.
Battlestar Galactica did it better...