Comment by bityard
6 days ago
I was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid and one of my favorite things in the whole world was thinking about the Enterprise's computer and Data, each one's strengths and limitations, and whether there was really any fundamental difference between the two besides the fact that Data had a body he could walk around in.
The Enterprise computer was (usually) portrayed as fairly close to what we have now with today's "AI": it could synthesize, analyze, and summarize the entirety of Federation knowledge and perform actions on behalf of the user. This is what we are using LLMs for now. In general, the shipboard computer didn't hallucinate except during most of the numerous holodeck episodes. It could rewrite portions of its own code when the plot demanded it.
Data had, in theory, a personality. But that personality was basically, "acting like a pedantic robot." We are told he is able to grow intellectually and acquire skills, but with perfect memory and fine motor control, he can already basically "do" any human endeavor with a few milliseconds of research. Although things involving human emotion (art, comedy, love) he is pretty bad at and has to settle for sampling, distilling, and imitating thousands to millions of examples of human creation. (Not unlike "AI" art of today.)
Side notes about some of the dodgy writing:
A few early epsiodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation treated the Enterprise D computer as a semi-omniscient character and it always bugged me. Because it seemed to "know" things that it shouldn't and draw conclusions that it really shouldn't have been able to. "Hey computer, we're all about to die, solve the plot for us so we make it to next week's episode!" Thankfully someone got the memo and that only happened a few times. Although I always enjoyed episodes that centered around the ship or crew itself somehow instead of just another run-in with aliens.
The writers were always adamant that Data had no emotions (when not fitted with the emotion chip) but we heard him say things _all the time_ that were rooted in emotion, they were just not particularly strong emotions. And he claimed to not grasp humor, but quite often made faces reflecting the mood of the room or indicating he understood jokes made by other crew members.
ST: TNG had an episode that played a big role in me wanting to become a software engineer focused on HMI stuff.
It's the relatively crummy season 4 episode Identity Crisis, in which the Enterprise arrives at a planet to check up on an away team containing a college friend of Geordi's, only to find the place deserted. All they have to go on is a bodycam video from one of the away team members.
The centerpiece of the episode is an extended sequence of Geordi working in close collaboration with the Enterprise computer to analyze the footage and figure out what happened, which takes him from a touchscreen-and-keyboard workstation (where he interacts by voice, touch and typing) to the holodeck, where the interaction continues seamlessly. Eventually he and the computer figure out there's a seemingly invisible object casting a shadow in the reconstructed 3D scene and back-project a humanoid form and they figure out everyone's still around, just diseased and ... invisible.
I immediately loved that entire sequence as a child, it was so engrossingly geeky. I kept thinking about how the mixed-mode interaction would work, how to package and take all that state between different workstations and rooms, have it all go from 2D to 3D, etc. Great stuff.
The sequence in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CDhEwhOm44&t=710s
That episode was uniquely creepy to me (together with episode 131 "Schisms") as a kid. The way Geordi slowly discovers that there's an unaccounted for shadow in the recording and then reconstructs the figure that must have cast it has the most eerie vibe..
Agreed! I think partially it was also that the "bodycam" found footage had such an unusual cinematography style for the show. TNG wasn't exactly known for handheld cams and lights casting harsh shadows. It all felt so out of place.
It's an interesting episode in that it's usually overlooked for being a fairly crappy screenplay, but is really challenging directorially: Blocking and editing that geeky computer sequence, breaking new ground stylistically for the show, etc.
>"Being a robot's great, but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad".
From Futurama in a obvious parody of how Data was portrayed
I always thought that Data had an innate ability to learn emotions, learn empathy, learn how to be human because he desired it. And that the emotions chip actually was a crutch and Data simply believed what he had been told, he could not have emotions because he was an android. But, as you say, he clearly feels close to Geordi and cares about him. He is afraid if Spot is missing. He paints and creates music and art that reflects his experience. Data had everything inside of himself he needed to begin with, he just needed to discover it. Data, was an example to the rest of us. At least in TNG. In the movies he was a crazy person. But so was everyone else.
He's just Spock 2.0... no emotions or suddenly too many, and he's even got the evil twin.
> The writers were always adamant that Data had no emotions... but quite often made faces reflecting the mood of the room or indicating he understood jokes made by other crew members.
This doesn't seem too different from how our current AI chatbots don't actually understand humor or have emotions, but can still explain a joke to you or generate text with a humorous tone if you ask them to based on samples, right?
> "Hey computer, we're all about to die, solve the plot for us so we make it to next week's episode!"
I'm curious, do you recall a specific episode or two that reflect what you feel boiled down to this?
Thanks, love this – it's something I've thought about as well!