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| ▲ | fercircularbuf 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Star Trek is a plausible future I'd like to live in. It depends entirely on education, cultural values, and ethics. It's a future worth striving for, real or not. | | |
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Star Trek isn't plausible. Free energy isn't possible. Matter replication isn't possible. Teleportation and faster than light travel aren't possible. You can't simply out-think and out-pluck the laws of physics. edit: not even with AI. Because I know there are people here who believe that AI will turn into a superintelligence so advanced that it will literally rewrite the laws of reality like the Eschaton from Charles Stross' Singularity Sky but that also isn't possible. Moreover the pure egalitarian and voluntarist society of Star Trek isn't plausible. Humans aren't simply going to "evolve beyond our base desires," as Picard once put it. Even if we did have Star Trek style replicators, free energy, teleportation and FTL, and everyone had everything they could possibly want freely provided to them without cost or obligation, people would still want to have more than their neighbor to dominate and control, to be king of the mountain. They would still hate and kill. You can't educate people out of human nature, and every manner of abomination can and will be justified by someone's ethics or cultural values. | | |
| ▲ | fercircularbuf 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I should clarify that when I wrote plausible I meant the societal aspects you touched on in your second point. As long as we are human, we will continue to experience our imperfection and continue to be prone to giving in to our base desires. And of course one group's culture shapes their ethics differently than another group's. Ethics is, after all, arbitrary. But one could still look at Star Trek and imagine a society where people's needs are met better than they are now, where we have systems in place to prevent a complete erosion of society better than we have now, where the basic principle of not exploiting others for personal gain is taught better than we teach it now, where we don't tolerate those that violate that principle. You will still have hate. People will still kill. But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that. | | |
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that. We already have that at least, it's basically anywhere but the United States. Unfortunately if Columbine and Sandy Hook didn't change things for the better I think the US is a lost cause in that regard. |
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| ▲ | dayyan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “Isn’t real” isn’t a rebuttal. It’s just refusing to think. | | |
| ▲ | wyre 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's a rebuttal in the same way that saying the Vulcans in Star Trek use AI in their classrooms. Star Trek is a fictional story in a fictional universe that doesn't have to follow the laws and rules of science, society, reality, etc for the sake of telling a story that fans will want to follow. | | |
| ▲ | jhbadger 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you miss the point of Star Trek, it, even more than most SF, isn't "really" about the future fictional or otherwise -- it is using the tropes of SF to make commentary on our society through analogy. That being said, I'm not sure the OP recognizes that Vulcans aren't entirely presented positively on the show -- they are generally viewed as missing part of life with their lack of emotions. | | |
| ▲ | dayyan 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Too many words. It's cool and fiction is how we stress-test ideas before they become policy. | | |
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No one on Star Trek was "stress-testing" anything of the sort. Stress-testing only works in reality, where the stresses are also real, or even in a simulation of reality. Star Trek is neither, it's just fantasy. It doesn't test anything. | | |
| ▲ | dayyan 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you have anything to add other than snark? Can you demonstrate how the scene you mentioned provides a "stress test" for modern real life AI policy? What lessons should Mamdani take from that scene and how should he apply it to NYC schools? | | |
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