Remember when La Forge goes to an AI conference and gains assassin skills? Or when Worf’s spine is repaired through gen-AI-tronics. And don’t forget about the GenAI people who eradicated the gender problem from society.
Sorry, couldn’t help it. I do appreciate the actual shout-out to AI in the La Forge example, as well as the prophetic brainwashing that ensues.
What we have now is ad-nauseum layers of markov chains. It’s brute-forcing the problem, and it also yields a very suboptimal and unreliable output. The “A” part of “AI” in the modern context is far more important, impactful, and accurately descriptive than the “I” part. Machine intelligence in the context of ST is true machine intelligence - which is essentially the point of episodes like “Measure of a Man”.
If Lt Data was backed by an LLM, the case would had been open and shut; he would never come up with novel ideas or realizations, never be allowed to be the OOD on third shift, never be allowed to directly manipulate controls of the warp core (remember, if you mess it up, it’s basically just a fucking huge antimatter bomb), never be allowed to keep another being (Spot) as a pet… we can go on, but you get the point.
I should add: the fact that modern LLM marketing leans so hard into incurious laypersons conflating their stupid predictive text generators with the concept of AI as presented in science fiction is one of the primary points that I absolutely fucking hate about LLMs and the whole house of cards industry built around it.