Fire in the hole!
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.
Even in the future it breaks containment and endangers human life.
Meh I thought the holodeck was mostly a writer’s crutch and an excuse to loot the Paramount lot for period costumes.
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.
LLMs and AI are real
I would say that the “AI” we currently have aren’t really AI as most people imagine or how they are thought depicted in science fiction.
Intellect usually requires a capacity to think, understand, and at least mimic the way the mind learns. The current machine learning we currently call AI is more a kin to the classic Chinese Room thought experiment.
You should check out a book named “Blindsight” by Peter Watts (and his side-sequel called “Echopraxia”). They delve into forms of intelligence that evolved completely separately from what we would consider ‘normal’. Also biologically-plausible vampires in space! Anyway, if you’re interested in splitting hairs between what really counts as AI I think you’d enjoy it. There’s even a passage that directly references the Chinese Room but if I say anything more I’ll spoil it. Plus it’s just a good book and a personal favorite of mine and I try to get as many people as possible to check it out 😆.
I mean lots of scifi directly relate holodecksb to a sketchy digital sex trafficking network.
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.
If I could have generative AI make me a paradise world that I could escape to whenever I’m not making money to pay for the paradise world, I wouldn’t give AF. Also, Star Trek has Fusion and Matter/Anti-matter power generation that’s nearly entirely clean.
Unfortunately, the best our AI can do is make people with 6 fingers and write bad code while using all the water and electricity.
The difference is that Starfleet has the ethical standards in place to make that technology non disruptive to their society. We wouldn’t survive being gifted ships that can glass the planet, for example. Wed fuck that up immediately.
There’s a handful of differences, I’ll leave other point them out.
Is there? It’s a machine, which learns and autonomously makes decisions based on that learning. It generates a scene.
I dunno, sounds like genAI to me, albeit a handful of generations down the line
What happens when they become real?
I’ll have been dead for about 8 million years
It’s a little more than just the genAI part tho.
You can fuck the holograms. If real world genAI was fuckable, FuckAI would not be an anti-AI community; it would be a NSFW one.
Where does your jizz go?
Literally the first episode of Lower Decks has someone off-hand mention having to empty the holodeck cum trap.
In universe the holodeck generates a certain kind of matter that can’t leave the holodeck. So your jizz goes into the holomatter lady who is then presumably disinterested atom by atom just like a teleporter. So your jizz gets dissolved into the ether.
Into the biofilters until some poor lower deck person empties it:
Into the hussy
Artificial intelligence in science fiction is intelligence that’s artificial.
Artificial intelligence in real life is more akin to what we’d call “artificial flavors” in some fruit drink that contains 0% fruit. Isn’t fruit, doesn’t taste like fruit, but it’s purple and sweet, so fuck it: “grape”. We’ve accomplished the “artificial” part, but not the bit that actually matters.
So, yeah, AI in sci-fi is unironically great. “AI” irl is shit. If the real version ever comes close to the sci-fi version, you’ll see a lot of the haters change our tune, but until then we’ll call a turd a turd.
OK, but how will we ever get to “great” AI if we don’t invest in less great AI to drive research. If the luddites on Lemmy calls the shots, Data will never see the light of day.
Well, rolling with the artificial flavors analogy, we can start by stopping the infuriating trend of adding artificial grape flavor to every fucking food item under the sun. No one asked for or wanted that shit, but now it’s become a chore to find so much as a bag of coffee beans that doesn’t have some blip on the packaging advertising “Now with grape!!” Not only does it taste bad, but it’s caused the cost of food to fucking double.
Second, we can start being honest about what it actually is. Again, it doesn’t taste like grape, so why the fuck are we calling it grape? With AI this is as much on us as it is with the companies marketing that garbage - for ages we’ve been calling so much as an NPC’s pathing algorithm in a videogame “AI” even though there’s objectively no intelligence at play. We’ve since tried to move the goal posts a bit by relabeling actual AI as “AGI” but I guarantee that’ll just become another term to muddy the waters with marketing bullshit. The shit we’re calling “AI” is just categorically not even on the same path as the the kind of AI we see in sci-fi. So if you want Data to see the light of day, we’ll need to stop wasting our time and money on what is effectively a spell checker that’s wrong occasionally.
Unless you think Data is just a chat bot with no consciousness, in which case, hooray, we’ve done it: AI. 🎉 …now can I please have a mug of coffee without Grape™ syrup in it? I know, such a Luddite, drinking coffee without grape! Guilty as charged. But adding that shit to my coffee is never going to get us a product that tastes and feels etc like a grape, so if that’s what you’re after, maybe keep it in R&D and off the fucking grocery shelves.
“research” doesn’t need billions of dollars in commercial data centres. The shitty “ai” we have is all about line must go up.
“Make an opponent capable of defeating Data”
ST AI: Have a supercharged Moriarty.
RL AI: deletes production database
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.
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.
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…
Plus I think it helps that much of what the holodeck recreates is centuries old at that point. 21st century earth, long ago. It’s not anyone’s current creations, and then beyond that it’s using data that the federation personally got by exploration. Like if people only used AI to generate medieval drawings I don’t think anyone would be too upset really. Maybe weirded out but not upset. Aside from the environmental concerns I guess.
however generating holo characters that look like your coworkers and doing weird stuff to them is a entirely canon issue. And Star Trek never touched on it, but wow would it be easy to fake footage of historical events in a holodeck, especially to civilizations without advanced technology. I work in history as my career and the amount of YouTube videos telling fake stories and showing fake footage of 20th century history is genuinely terrifying. I don’t know what the solution is. Digitization was meant to preserve historical footage but now it just makes it look just like the fake stuff. If anyone digitized historical footage and the physical no longer exists, verifying anything will become a nightmare and sometimes it would be strictly possible.
Honestly the more I think about the holodeck the more I think it’s dangerous as fuck, literally and socially, and Star Trek shows usually only very innocence uses for it. Like you thought parasocial relationships are bad now?
Some trekker should correct me here, or clarify, but I’m pretty sure that in TNG the character Barclay used the holodeck to treat his crippling social anxiety, which involved holos of his crewmates and got into some very awkward situations.
One extremely interesting aspect of that episode is that while Barclay DID create holographic depictions of the crew for his fantasy world, and it does weird out the staff, they don’t actually present the holodeck recreations of the crew members as a PROBLEM in and of itself. The prevailing view isn’t “This is unacceptable” - it’s that “This is a disruptive fantasy that is preventing Barclay from developing socially and fitting in as a member of the crew.” Whether you chalk that up to bad writing or the future being accepting of using the holodeck to realize one’s personal desires is up to the viewer’s interpretation, I guess. Even after all these years, I don’t think we have enough information about the Star Trek universe to know.
Also Geordie falling in love with the holodeck version of a visiting researcher, Christy Henshaw in the episode “Booby Trap.” She encounters her holodeck version swooning over Geordie and it weirds her out tremendously
That’s the one I had in mind when writing the first comment. The worse part is Geordie kept that largely respectable. Could you imagine what someone with no self control and a holodeck of their coworkers could do?
I’d love if there was an exploration of what holodeck usage for civilians looks like. If you can have a holodeck that can bring the entire universe to you, why bother doing anything? Especially since you are already in a post scarcity society where strictly speaking you don’t need to do anything. I always felt that the federation having motivated people is societal momentum from earlier centuries, but in a couple more centuries I think it’s entirely plausible that most of humanity would become simply indifferent to the greater world around them, infinitely entertained by holodecks and again, zero scarcity. Honestly, not so different from the Q in a way. How much of society in Star Trek is actually productive? Someone’s gotta be mining the dilithium. Is there genuinely enough people who just volunteer for that?
How exactly does a post scarcity society function?…. And could they please tell us so we can get there ASAP.
Actually Star Trek: Lower Decks covers the issue of using AI for nefarious purposes. In the series finale, an enemy Klingon superimposes video of a Starfleet admiral over herself making a message ordering the handover of a Klingon asylum seeker (second-in-command smells something fishy and hides the asylum seeker, until the video is confirmed a fake). Then in the comic Shaxs’ Worst Day, the head security officer, Shaxs, uses the holodeck to recreate the bridge of a ship he just commandeered to pretend to be the captain he just killed while communicating with evil universe Starfleet command.
It should be noted that Lower Decks was made in the last decade, and not only incorporates a lot of contemporary social/technological issues and concerns, but also is a comedic reflection on the Star Trek franchise, and freely calls out things that have made fans go “huh?”
God I loved lower decks. I think that episode still only scratches the surface of malicious use cases for holodeck technology.
Godamn Lower Decks really was the best Trek we had and they fucking cancelled it
*Shaxs
Corrected!
The Star Trek universe also seems to be able to run their AI without boiling the oceans.
Still requires boiling oceans, but they’ve found a few uninhabited water planets that can safely be boiled without bothering anybody.
(Also, our AI isn’t even that good. They’re not boiling the oceans. They’re boiling what previous little fresh water we have that could be used for drinking or irrigation. It would be a lot less of a problem if they just built their cooling systems to deal with salt water and used seawater instead.)
EXACTLY
If they didn’t invest our entire country and ecosystem into it because they thought it meant digital slaves that could replace the meat popsicles they abhor, then it might not have looked so fucking evil
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
Holodecks are discrete programs with subroutines.
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.
