Fire in the hole!
Even in the future it breaks containment and endangers human life.
Star Trek is also a post scarcity society and they aren’t using water to run the models. IP ownership in the Federation is still a thing though, so long as the genAI isn’t using copyrighted material, it’s fine.
If I could have generative AI make me a paradise world that I could escape to whenever I’m not making money to pay for the paradise world, I wouldn’t give AF. Also, Star Trek has Fusion and Matter/Anti-matter power generation that’s nearly entirely clean.
Unfortunately, the best our AI can do is make people with 6 fingers and write bad code while using all the water and electricity.
Meh I thought the holodeck was mostly a writer’s crutch and an excuse to loot the Paramount lot for period costumes.
The simplest answer, real world LLMs and AI are real, and holodecks are fictional. Plenty of things are cool in fiction and not something we should actually build.
See the classic tweet about the Torment Nexus.
LLMs and AI are real
I would say that the “AI” we currently have aren’t really AI as most people imagine or how they are thought depicted in science fiction.
Intellect usually requires a capacity to think, understand, and at least mimic the way the mind learns. The current machine learning we currently call AI is more a kin to the classic Chinese Room thought experiment.
I mean lots of scifi directly relate holodecksb to a sketchy digital sex trafficking network.
There’s a handful of differences, I’ll leave other point them out.
Is there? It’s a machine, which learns and autonomously makes decisions based on that learning. It generates a scene.
I dunno, sounds like genAI to me, albeit a handful of generations down the line
The difference is that Starfleet has the ethical standards in place to make that technology non disruptive to their society. We wouldn’t survive being gifted ships that can glass the planet, for example. Wed fuck that up immediately.
What happens when they become real?
Star Trek’s universe: Federation citizens live in essentially zero scarcity where labor is optional and people can dedicate their lives to basically anything they like that this within their capabilities.
Star Trek’s AI: A typically flawless tool (when the plot doesn’t require an incident), optionally used by the individual, to perform complex calculations, simulations or provide immersion entertainment, complimenting whatever task needs done.
Our universe: We live in a capitalist society where the survival of 95% of the population requires them to sell their labor, where the majority of the population works in any job(s) they can get to make ends meet, where working in a creative or intellectually fulfilling field is a rare blessing and prohibitive to most, where your capitalist overlords claim the majority of your productivity for themselves and see the wages they do pay you as a burden to them that should be minimized regardless of your well-being.
Our AI: Devalues or replaces creative and intellectual roles. Forced down the throats of workers and consumers. Used to collectively monitor everyone. Used to push more wealth to a concentrated few. Notably and constantly unreliable while given unearned trust. Not actually intelligent, just good at specific kinds of prediction and parroting based on training from real works from real people that was stolen without the consent of the creators to be fed into the machines to be plagiarized on request. A genuine risk to the stability of our economy. A nightmare for the mental health of children and those vulnerable to delusions and/or thoughts of self-harm. Increasingly used to replace thought and skill development making us collectively dumber and more reliant on it.
It’s a little more than just the genAI part tho.
You can fuck the holograms. If real world genAI was fuckable, FuckAI would not be an anti-AI community; it would be a NSFW one.
Where does your jizz go?
Literally the first episode of Lower Decks has someone off-hand mention having to empty the holodeck cum trap.
In universe the holodeck generates a certain kind of matter that can’t leave the holodeck. So your jizz goes into the holomatter lady who is then presumably disinterested atom by atom just like a teleporter. So your jizz gets dissolved into the ether.
Into the biofilters until some poor lower deck person empties it:
Into the hussy
“Make an opponent capable of defeating Data”
ST AI: Have a supercharged Moriarty.
RL AI: deletes production database
Wrong, the holodeck follow instructions, the
AIneural simulation don’t.Unless you like to play in simulation created by a simulation, coded with an abstract language, run into a virtual machine.
At some point in time, humanity will learn.Artificial intelligence in science fiction is intelligence that’s artificial.
Artificial intelligence in real life is more akin to what we’d call “artificial flavors” in some fruit drink that contains 0% fruit. Isn’t fruit, doesn’t taste like fruit, but it’s purple and sweet, so fuck it: “grape”. We’ve accomplished the “artificial” part, but not the bit that actually matters.
So, yeah, AI in sci-fi is unironically great. “AI” irl is shit. If the real version ever comes close to the sci-fi version, you’ll see a lot of the haters change our tune, but until then we’ll call a turd a turd.
OK, but how will we ever get to “great” AI if we don’t invest in less great AI to drive research. If the luddites on Lemmy calls the shots, Data will never see the light of day.
Well, rolling with the artificial flavors analogy, we can start by stopping the infuriating trend of adding artificial grape flavor to every fucking food item under the sun. No one asked for or wanted that shit, but now it’s become a chore to find so much as a bag of coffee beans that doesn’t have some blip on the packaging advertising “Now with grape!!” Not only does it taste bad, but it’s caused the cost of food to fucking double.
Second, we can start being honest about what it actually is. Again, it doesn’t taste like grape, so why the fuck are we calling it grape? With AI this is as much on us as it is with the companies marketing that garbage - for ages we’ve been calling so much as an NPC’s pathing algorithm in a videogame “AI” even though there’s objectively no intelligence at play. We’ve since tried to move the goal posts a bit by relabeling actual AI as “AGI” but I guarantee that’ll just become another term to muddy the waters with marketing bullshit. The shit we’re calling “AI” is just categorically not even on the same path as the the kind of AI we see in sci-fi. So if you want Data to see the light of day, we’ll need to stop wasting our time and money on what is effectively a spell checker that’s wrong occasionally.
Unless you think Data is just a chat bot with no consciousness, in which case, hooray, we’ve done it: AI. 🎉 …now can I please have a mug of coffee without Grape™ syrup in it? I know, such a Luddite, drinking coffee without grape! Guilty as charged. But adding that shit to my coffee is never going to get us a product that tastes and feels etc like a grape, so if that’s what you’re after, maybe keep it in R&D and off the fucking grocery shelves.
“research” doesn’t need billions of dollars in commercial data centres. The shitty “ai” we have is all about line must go up.
It’s not generative AI we hate, it’s LLMs.
LLMs are generative AI.
Yes but not all generative AI is LLMs. I hate wine, but saying “you know beer is alcohol too” is not something that should make me feel hypocritical about liking beer. It’s not alcohol I hate, it’s wine.
Now this might have something to do with what they mean when they disable safeguards. Maybe there’s a layer of user-defined limits that are carefully defined and that’s part of the craft of a good holodeck program, but when safeguards are disabled, it just runs as a raw universe simulation, matter, photons and all.
