So. Well. Um. Yeah.

Has Star Trek been grooming us for AI for decades?

https://mastodon.social/@DS90210/115911880113389927

@dexter There’s a whole conversation to be had here about this exact subject. Long term, these models exist and will continue to exist, and the best we can hope for is to make the best of it. Star Trek’s computer interaction provides a useful template for positive result of a bad situation.

@mos_8502 @dexter i think that star trek had a more healthy vision of AI as an engineered system, instead of a magic blackbox, and these are important splits in the real history of AI

@beka_valentine @dexter Very true. AI in Star Trek is far more useful, far more grounded in in-universe reality. We should work towards emulating that, I think.

@beka_valentine @dexter It’s true that people are treating LLMs as a magic box with all the answers. That’s unhealthy at best. That’s a social problem that doesn’t have a technical solution.

@mos_8502 @dexter im not even thinking of the random folx using them, i mean design-wise. as a tool in ones engineering toolbox, they're terrible black boxes. a lot of the AI currently being deployed is. its very bad when used inappropriately, which is a lot of the time

@mos_8502 @dexter as a simple example, which ive personally been griping about for over 10 years now, modern spellcheck systems are extremely heavily based on machine learning techniques which produce absurd behavior

@mos_8502 @dexter behavior such as learning your typos and incorporating them into its own suggestion system, to the point of eventually substituting the correct spelling with the typo. this happens to me on a semi-regular basis

@beka_valentine @mos_8502 @dexter at the same time they can’t properly deal with raccompound words and so there is this extremely distinctive style of phone german where words are just unnaturally torn apart at word boundaries because spellcheck said so

@beka_valentine @mos_8502 @dexter I don't think Star Trek showed AI in a positive light. Just thinking about the The Original Series, there was the M5 computer (The Uilmate Computer), Nomad (The Changeling), Landru (The Return of the Archons), Vaal (The Apple), and V'Ger from The Motion Picture.

@Commodore_Kevin @mos_8502 @dexter the ships computer and the holodeck are all AI