Fire in the hole!
What happens when they become real?
Even in the future it breaks containment and endangers human life.
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.
Especially in “Schisms” (S6E5) where they build the operating table by trial and error… 100% feels like a modern ai imagegen workflow (only 3d and tangible).
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.
The part about using real actors and people in simulated performances in movies after they’re dead is the same in holodeck and current cg/ai. Stephen Hawking was used, the real person consented to be on the tv show but the in show historical figure did not.
bet they aren’t built on LLMs either
There are a few episodes where various people mention putting a lot of time and wish into building holodeck sims. I’m guessing it’s more like having a futuristic version of Unity/UnrealE/etc, with a common asset pool and an AI assisted interface
don’t care. the future isn’t llms.
I mean you can also run a generative modal locally using green energy, but try going into fuckai and telling them that.
You can run it at home on your own local machine using solar power.
They are just going to start discussing the ethics of stolen training data
- What are their thoughts on piracy?
- Have they ever saved an image they saw online to use in a different place (wallpaper, repost the meme, etc.)? What is so different from someone using it to train their own model which they use for themselves?
It’s a good thing that what kind of energy it runs on is the only problem with the technology and that we can cheaply generate the necessary amount of power at home.
I mean, you certainly don’t need any more energy than you would for video games, for most of the stuff people are looking to use at home.
It is possible to generate it, but even if someone can’t, I don’t see the fuckai people yelling at game Devs for increasing requirements for so little gain, or at GPU Devs for not focusing enough on the draw power of GPUs. In fact, just 1 or 2 years ago I think, NVIDIA released a GPU generation that was only a little more powerful but had a lot more energy efficiency, and they got shat on by the internet because it wasn’t powerful enough - no cared about the lower power draw.
oh yeah running a rack of gpus full out for inference and whatnot is exactly like playing some games.
buuuullll SHIT.
Also, tons of people have complained about the increasing power requirements of increasingly large GPUs, the increasing hardware demands of “AAA” games despite the low quality, etc… An entire universe of indie games has emerged in part because of that bullshit.
“Tons of people”
I was one of those people, on Lemmy, and I’m telling you first hand the vast majority of people did not give a shit, they just wanted a more powerful GPU
the increasing power requirements of increasingly large GPUs
yup - a friend of mine has a dead 3080 - nvidia did not do a good job designing those power connectors.
You don’t need all that to run local morals, don’t straw man me.
local morals
lol. I know you mean local models, but also I suspect your local morals are lacking too considering the other comment.
the inference and model construction take grunt bud; just because you’re not doing it yourself doesn’t make it free.
No it doesn’t, you are arguing in ignoring and this is pointless. Have a good one.
well yeah, some people care about the entire shit being built on theft. why wouldn’t you care about that?
oh they didn’t steal from you. that’s why you don’t care.
It doesn’t have to be built on theft. And what are your thoughts on piracy?
it doesn’t have to, but it always seems to be lol.
book eating, literally stealing texts from future generations to feed llms.
my thoughts on piracy? I don’t pirate shit. And I certainly don’t rip off entire chunks of humanity - the painters, musicians, authors etc., wholescale like llms do.
you really just assume everyone is stealing therefor it’s ok? how sad.
You’re on Lemmy mate, don’t bs me and tell me you think most people here don’t pirate. People here will downvote you for calling piracy theft but then upvote you for accusing llms of stealing.
And have you never downloaded a picture for a wallpaper, or to repost, send to friends, etc? Because that is equivalent to someone using a local model to do things. We are not talking large scale models, which seems to be what you keep shifting the conversation to. Anyway I’m tired if of this conversation, good bye.
Meh I thought the holodeck was mostly a writer’s crutch and an excuse to loot the Paramount lot for period costumes.
The holodeck is better than having an ancestral Irish cottage in some random village on a colony planet somewhere.
Fair enough.
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Holodecks are generative AI that actually works.
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All LLMs are Generative AI, but not all Generative AIs are LLMs.
Holodecks are generative AI that actually works.
They work until the plot dictates that they don’t.
Doesn’t happen a lot.
Only they don’t make episodes of the 99.99% of times they work perfectly.
If .01% of the time it creates a problem that kills someone or endangers the entire ship that seems like a lot to me for something that is used constantly by the entire crew.
True.
Fortunately the .01% of the time there’s an error, its incredibly minor.
Half of the holodeck malfunctions threaten the entire ship
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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.
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.
You should check out a book named “Blindsight” by Peter Watts (and his side-sequel called “Echopraxia”). They delve into forms of intelligence that evolved completely separately from what we would consider ‘normal’. Also biologically-plausible vampires in space! Anyway, if you’re interested in splitting hairs between what really counts as AI I think you’d enjoy it. There’s even a passage that directly references the Chinese Room but if I say anything more I’ll spoil it. Plus it’s just a good book and a personal favorite of mine and I try to get as many people as possible to check it out 😆.
I have read blingsight, I haven’t yet picked up the sequel yet. I have a buddy that teaches cognitive science and philosophy of the mind at a university, so I get to hear him drunkenly rant about the topic pretty frequently.
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
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.
I never got the impression that the holodeck (or Data) worked at all like an LLM.
It doesn’t. An LLM uses modeling to approximate the shape of a question and generate a novel answer within the parameters. It’s like a shortcut to actually knowing everything and providing authoritative answers.
Sort of like the Scrabble champion who won in Spanish and French despite not knowing those languages. He simply learned patterns of words he could build with letters, but he didn’t know the meaning of any of the words.
The holodeck ostensibly has access to all of federation knowledge and history, and when it has to generate novel information (like what would Einstein say to Newton while playing poker) then it extrapolates that informtation based on the sum total of existing information. The holodeck computer has a thorough understanding of the question, the parameters, and the answers (holograms) it creates. It isn’t abstracting the question or approximating the shape of the answer.
You are giving writers way too much credit. They wanted to write stories around human characters. The AI is as advanced as story needs it to be. Dimming lights, yes, the SotA flagship AI is allowed to do it. But split second combat tactics? Only if AI is inside the humanoid character. Shouldn’t overthink it, the narratives would be lame otherwise.
Who mentioned LLMs?
Replace LLM with any of the current types of generative AI
If we got all the other socialist progressive benefits of the Star Trek universe, including no billionaires, then I think we’d be a lot less unhappy with generative AI as presented in that world.
How they built it, and what they plan to do with it is a pretty big part of the reason for our anger.
Yeah, if we de-meme it and really want to define it, the difference is Star Trek is a post-scarcity world, so generative AI building things doesn’t take anything away from human artists - it doesn’t affect their livelihoods because their livelihoods are guaranteed.
As always…
Plus I think it helps that much of what the holodeck recreates is centuries old at that point. 21st century earth, long ago. It’s not anyone’s current creations, and then beyond that it’s using data that the federation personally got by exploration. Like if people only used AI to generate medieval drawings I don’t think anyone would be too upset really. Maybe weirded out but not upset. Aside from the environmental concerns I guess.
however generating holo characters that look like your coworkers and doing weird stuff to them is a entirely canon issue. And Star Trek never touched on it, but wow would it be easy to fake footage of historical events in a holodeck, especially to civilizations without advanced technology. I work in history as my career and the amount of YouTube videos telling fake stories and showing fake footage of 20th century history is genuinely terrifying. I don’t know what the solution is. Digitization was meant to preserve historical footage but now it just makes it look just like the fake stuff. If anyone digitized historical footage and the physical no longer exists, verifying anything will become a nightmare and sometimes it would be strictly possible.
Honestly the more I think about the holodeck the more I think it’s dangerous as fuck, literally and socially, and Star Trek shows usually only very innocence uses for it. Like you thought parasocial relationships are bad now?
Some trekker should correct me here, or clarify, but I’m pretty sure that in TNG the character Barclay used the holodeck to treat his crippling social anxiety, which involved holos of his crewmates and got into some very awkward situations.
One extremely interesting aspect of that episode is that while Barclay DID create holographic depictions of the crew for his fantasy world, and it does weird out the staff, they don’t actually present the holodeck recreations of the crew members as a PROBLEM in and of itself. The prevailing view isn’t “This is unacceptable” - it’s that “This is a disruptive fantasy that is preventing Barclay from developing socially and fitting in as a member of the crew.” Whether you chalk that up to bad writing or the future being accepting of using the holodeck to realize one’s personal desires is up to the viewer’s interpretation, I guess. Even after all these years, I don’t think we have enough information about the Star Trek universe to know.
Also Geordie falling in love with the holodeck version of a visiting researcher, Christy Henshaw in the episode “Booby Trap.” She encounters her holodeck version swooning over Geordie and it weirds her out tremendously
That’s the one I had in mind when writing the first comment. The worse part is Geordie kept that largely respectable. Could you imagine what someone with no self control and a holodeck of their coworkers could do?
I’d love if there was an exploration of what holodeck usage for civilians looks like. If you can have a holodeck that can bring the entire universe to you, why bother doing anything? Especially since you are already in a post scarcity society where strictly speaking you don’t need to do anything. I always felt that the federation having motivated people is societal momentum from earlier centuries, but in a couple more centuries I think it’s entirely plausible that most of humanity would become simply indifferent to the greater world around them, infinitely entertained by holodecks and again, zero scarcity. Honestly, not so different from the Q in a way. How much of society in Star Trek is actually productive? Someone’s gotta be mining the dilithium. Is there genuinely enough people who just volunteer for that?
How exactly does a post scarcity society function?…. And could they please tell us so we can get there ASAP.
Surely that would all be automated. Wouldn’t mining just be teleporting it out if the mine?
Teleporter technology is severely underutilized in the show. Unless teleporters is why its a post scarcity society? they just teleport most of the resources out of the ground? Some materials, for reasons not always explained, are not able to be teleported though.
There is a lot of tech in star trek, or any sci fi really, that makes you go “wait couldn’t they use that to x” and the answer is usually yes but that wouldn’t make for good television. Kinda like in that scene in the star wars sequel where they rammed the ship into the imperial mega-ship. Why would the rebels bother fighting fair fights when they can just get random old ships that can barely do hyperdrive, and just ram them into the destroyers? 1 old musky ship for one top of the line star destroyer is an insanely good trade. Or what happens if you did that into a planet? You’d essentially be able to commit a 9/11 terrorist attack on a almost shoestring budget.
The more I think about how potent this tech would be for killing, it gives me a new perspective on the great filter theory.
I dunno, I want to live an interesting life, so I’d volunteer to try ALL the jobs. Mining dilithium, serving aboard a starship, fighting baddies on the outskirts of Federation territory, raising a family, becoming a holodeck program writer… A life of leisure means you get to try whatever you want, and can always fall back knowing you’ll be fine. I think more people would want to do stuff, like me, than you think.
Kinda like how every single pilot program and study they’ve done with basic income has had the same end result, no reduction in work force. People want to feel useful, and they want to get ahead. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when everything else is met, people just want to feel needed.
Actually Star Trek: Lower Decks covers the issue of using AI for nefarious purposes. In the series finale, an enemy Klingon superimposes video of a Starfleet admiral over herself making a message ordering the handover of a Klingon asylum seeker (second-in-command smells something fishy and hides the asylum seeker, until the video is confirmed a fake). Then in the comic Shax’s Worst Day, the head security officer, Shax, uses the holodeck to recreate the bridge of a ship he just commandeered to pretend to be the captain he just killed while communicating with evil universe Starfleet command.
It should be noted that Lower Decks was made in the last decade, and not only incorporates a lot of contemporary social/technological issues and concerns, but also is a comedic reflection on the Star Trek franchise, and freely calls out things that have made fans go “huh?”
Godamn Lower Decks really was the best Trek we had and they fucking cancelled it
*Shaxs
Corrected!
God I loved lower decks. I think that episode still only scratches the surface of malicious use cases for holodeck technology.
EXACTLY
If they didn’t invest our entire country and ecosystem into it because they thought it meant digital slaves that could replace the meat popsicles they abhor, then it might not have looked so fucking evil
The Star Trek universe also seems to be able to run their AI without boiling the oceans.
Still requires boiling oceans, but they’ve found a few uninhabited water planets that can safely be boiled without bothering anybody.
(Also, our AI isn’t even that good. They’re not boiling the oceans. They’re boiling what previous little fresh water we have that could be used for drinking or irrigation. It would be a lot less of a problem if they just built their cooling systems to deal with salt water and used seawater instead.)
Nah, they just run on a starship-sized AI powered by an Antimatter Reactor
Still needs cooling, tho…
Exactly! I am not anti-ai. I am opposed to corporate controlled, massively polluting, unreliable slop engines that will be used to surveil us and take our jobs without benefitting us in any way.
Depending on the rate of AI we will probably get something to the polity universe version than Star Trek.
Still not as bad but could be better
No holodecks, or more accurately, the ship’s computer, are fantasy AI. Chatbots will never be so cool.
There was this old book in my school classroom I remember that was speculating about the future; it had illustrations of robot butlers and maids helping people about the house in that 1960s-painting style. Think the future as seen in “The Jetsons”, or Andrew from “Bicentennial Man”.
That’s the “robot assistance” I was promised. So I’d say to my robot “Hey, can you turn the lights down?” And a humanoid robot would walk over to the light switch and turn the lights down.
Of course, it turns out building robots like that is hugely expensive so it’s easier to just sell smart lights that connect to a voice-activated app on your phone. That’s just not the same as a true general purpose robot, dammit! There’s no whimsy. Generative AI is ruining the Internet and for what? I’m no closer to my true robot butler and flying car.
About as cognitive as “nazis just love their country and people”
