Fire in the hole!
TBF, even on TNG, there were characters who complain about how fake replicator food and synthahol are, and they have whole episodes on Holoaddiction.
Replicator food can be identical but it’s also personally tuned for their nutrition and metabolism. The personal replicators and the bigger ones in ten forward aren’t programmed the same.
Oh would you look at that, resources and copyright are less important in a literal post-scarcity universe where everything is shared freely! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT!
It’s like fiction and reality are two different things.
No holodecks, or more accurately, the ship’s computer, are fantasy AI. Chatbots will never be so cool.
There was this old book in my school classroom I remember that was speculating about the future; it had illustrations of robot butlers and maids helping people about the house in that 1960s-painting style. Think the future as seen in “The Jetsons”, or Andrew from “Bicentennial Man”.
That’s the “robot assistance” I was promised. So I’d say to my robot “Hey, can you turn the lights down?” And a humanoid robot would walk over to the light switch and turn the lights down.
Of course, it turns out building robots like that is hugely expensive so it’s easier to just sell smart lights that connect to a voice-activated app on your phone. That’s just not the same as a true general purpose robot, dammit! There’s no whimsy. Generative AI is ruining the Internet and for what? I’m no closer to my true robot butler and flying car than I was 20 years ago.
I had this thought a long time ago. It’s not really wrong even.
Will Japanese holodeck programs have pixelation?
I fucking hate holodecks.
They are dangerous, psychologically destructive machines that have no place on earth. We have no idea what prolonged exposure to simulated environments does to the human brain. People are spending hours inside fake worlds instead of interacting with reality. Children are probably going to grow up thinking consequences aren’t real because their parents let them spend twelve hours a day fighting robots in a simulated medieval castle.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that the computer can generate literally anything you ask for.
That is not progress. That is an existential threat to society.
So, naturally, I have volunteered to personally test every single holodeck in the world.
Every last one.
I will spend as much time as necessary inside these horrible, dangerous machines so that nobody else has to endure the terrible psychological consequences of using them.
You are welcome.
Thank you for your service.
Listen here you little shit…
Star Trek is also a post scarcity society and they aren’t using water to run the models. IP ownership in the Federation is still a thing though, so long as the genAI isn’t using copyrighted material, it’s fine.
The part about using real actors and people in simulated performances in movies after they’re dead is the same in holodeck and current cg/ai. Stephen Hawking was used, the real person consented to be on the tv show but the in show historical figure did not.
There’s a difference between making a movie about an actor or other famous person and inserting an actor’s likeness into a movie that didn’t need it. If you become part of the cultural zeitgeist, people will talk about you. For an historic example of using someone’s likeness to sell a movie, you can look at Plan 9 from Outer Space and using footage of Bela Lugosi after he had died. That’s still considered bad taste. A new example is using including Tupac Shakur in the new Yakuza game AI or not, people aren’t exactly excited, but we’ll see what they do with it. Probably shouldn’t have used him in the trailer at least. There’s some gray areas with legacy characters in an on going franchise and whether or not you can find a look alike. I didn’t have a big issue with Tarkin being in Rouge One despite Peter Cushing being dead.
bet they aren’t built on LLMs either
There are a few episodes where various people mention putting a lot of time and wish into building holodeck sims. I’m guessing it’s more like having a futuristic version of Unity/UnrealE/etc, with a common asset pool and an AI assisted interface
For budgetary reason, they’re never that outlandish or creative sets, but I really liked the irony of the Captain Proton being a reoccurring thing
don’t care. the future isn’t llms.
Star Trek’s universe: Federation citizens live in essentially zero scarcity where labor is optional and people can dedicate their lives to basically anything they like that this within their capabilities.
Star Trek’s AI: A typically flawless tool (when the plot doesn’t require an incident), optionally used by the individual, to perform complex calculations, simulations or provide immersion entertainment, complimenting whatever task needs done.
Our universe: We live in a capitalist society where the survival of 95% of the population requires them to sell their labor, where the majority of the population works in any job(s) they can get to make ends meet, where working in a creative or intellectually fulfilling field is a rare blessing and prohibitive to most, where your capitalist overlords claim the majority of your productivity for themselves and see the wages they do pay you as a burden to them that should be minimized regardless of your well-being.
Our AI: Devalues or replaces creative and intellectual roles. Forced down the throats of workers and consumers. Used to collectively monitor everyone. Used to push more wealth to a concentrated few. Notably and constantly unreliable while given unearned trust. Not actually intelligent, just good at specific kinds of prediction and parroting based on training from real works from real people that was stolen without the consent of the creators to be fed into the machines to be plagiarized on request. A genuine risk to the stability of our economy. A nightmare for the mental health of children and those vulnerable to delusions and/or thoughts of self-harm. Increasingly used to replace thought and skill development making us collectively dumber and more reliant on it.
I would argue star treks AI is constantly going wrong, and the fact that it can create objects which can actually harm you, is taken with a grain of salt by them.
Holodecks are incredibly dangerous, easily hacked, and the holo style workers they they, like the doctor on Voyager, will IMMEDIATELY TURN EVIL WHEN ANYTHING TOUCHES THEIR ETHICS SUBROUTINES!
Their use is AI should be terrifying to us.
Even in the future it breaks containment and endangers human life.
The simplest answer, real world LLMs and AI are real, and holodecks are fictional. Plenty of things are cool in fiction and not something we should actually build.
See the classic tweet about the Torment Nexus.
I mean lots of scifi directly relate holodecksb to a sketchy digital sex trafficking network.
If we got all the other socialist progressive benefits of the Star Trek universe, including no billionaires, then I think we’d be a lot less unhappy with generative AI as presented in that world.
How they built it, and what they plan to do with it is a pretty big part of the reason for our anger.
Yeah, if we de-meme it and really want to define it, the difference is Star Trek is a post-scarcity world, so generative AI building things doesn’t take anything away from human artists - it doesn’t affect their livelihoods because their livelihoods are guaranteed.
As always…
Exactly! I am not anti-ai. I am opposed to corporate controlled, massively polluting, unreliable slop engines that will be used to surveil us and take our jobs without benefitting us in any way.
Depending on the rate of AI we will probably get something to the polity universe version than Star Trek.
Still not as bad but could be better
“Make an opponent capable of defeating Data”
ST AI: Have a supercharged Moriarty.
RL AI: deletes production database
Perhaps we give it a pass in a post-scarcity world? When capitalism isn’t in the picture, it’s not taking jobs or ruining the environment or anything like that.
Although, you kinda still have to “write” a holodeck program and it also seems to be slightly harder than prompting or they’d be doing it on the fly a bit more.
