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Star Trek was a fiction series that heavily focused on human experiences and relationships. Picard et al famously do a lot of things that actual navy commanders would absolutely never do, like commanding away teams in hostile and/or dangerous territory.

Having an AI to pilot the ship, target the weapons and control away teams robots/holograms would take away from the core purpose of the show which is to tell a gripping story. It's not meant as an exploration on how to use AI in space exploration.



ST isn't military fiction. It's science fiction. Thinking about technology is absolutely one of its core aims.

They had a whole episode about the legal and moral aspect of AI human rights.


It definitely seeks to explore the impact of many technologies, but the impact of AI was not really one of them. They spent one whole episode out of 178 on AI, and there was a _very_ small plotline near the start of TNG about Data wishing to be more human.

EDIT: There was also the episode where a holodeck character gains true sentience, but then the crew proceeds to imprison it forever into a virtual world and this is treated by the show as the ethical thing to do. Trapping any human in a simulation is (correctly IMO) treated as a horrible thing, but doing it to an evidently sentient AI is apparently no problem.


It’s a good example of what people would like out of AI though - perfect recall and solid reasoning/calculation capabilities; an assistant that covers our weaknesses.




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