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Why are we building the technology of a dystopia? What happened to shows like Star Trek which gave us more helpful goals to work toward?

by panic 9y ago

minimaxir 9y ago
The reason I made this was that I noticed Mask R-CNN’s masking and object identification capabilities were pretty good and I needed a refresher on Python-based image manipulation. https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/976277067070300160?s=21 https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/976277067070300160?s=21 And then I remembered Black Mirror and it gave me an idea. The step toward dystopia was not the primary motivation for this project.
- smithmayowa 9y ago
  This is cool I remember trying to build a chrome extension for something like this a while ago for detecting and blocking images of animals people had phobia's for (e.g snake, spider and e.t.c) and I tried using pythons dlib object detector and shape landmarks predictor and it was a very stressful exercise in futility. Now I will have a look at mark r-cnn as it might help solve my problem and my few minutes of total brain fuckery after unlucky seeing a picture or a video with any kind of snakes in it, the big one's are of course worse.
krapp 9y ago
The Star Trek whose utopia needed a world war against the ethnic cleansing of genetically engineered Nazi supermen and an alien invasion to "civilize" humanity in the post-apocalyptic aftermath? After which which humankind just somehow evolved beyond the petty desires and violent impulses that had hitherto been baked into its primate genome for millions of years? I love Star Trek but one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, it's just a matter of perspective. And as far as technology goes, the original series predicted a couple of things, and we got a Space Shuttle named after the Enterprise, but most of it is magic and therefore useless to the real world. No matter how hard we work or how much we believe in ourselves we're never getting matter replication or transporters or holodecks that will create sentient life on command. We could look at the ideals of Star Trek, but remember that what we see is quasi-militaristic, autocratic and there is no real sign anywhere of privacy or freedom from the surveillance infrastructure of the computer. Even the transporters keep copies of people's entire genetic code.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pluma 9y ago
  Depends. In TNG the outlook tends to be far more rosy than in DS9 or DIS. There were a few episodes which hinted at darker tendencies in Starfleet but those usually turned out to be corrupt individuals or some kind of alien influence. Having grown up with TNG my impression of the Federation was much like what the US was pretending to be prior to 9/11 (i.e. prior to "world police"), a beacon of liberty, equality and hope for mankind, but with all the ills of real-world USA eliminated by scientific progress and a more idealistic and altruistic society. The show had a few militaristic undertones initially but they mostly went away in season 2 and later, except for the ranks. The ranks and offensive capabilities are lampshaded a number of times but Picard and other characters frequently prove that those are just born out of necessity and for self-defense, never to attack. The Borg represent such a threat exactly because they are not interested in diplomacy and Starfleet has to fight an all-out war to survive them -- unlike the Romulans or Klingons who even at the worst of times mostly didn't outright attack them.

Why are we building the technology of a dystopia? What happened to shows like Star Trek which gave us more helpful goals to work toward?

by panic 9y ago

Why are we building the technology of a dystopia? What happened to shows like Star Trek which gave us more helpful goals to work toward?

minimaxir 9y ago

The reason I made this was that I noticed Mask R-CNN’s masking and object identification capabilities were pretty good and I needed a refresher on Python-based image manipulation. https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/976277067070300160?s=21 https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/976277067070300160?s=21 And then I remembered Black Mirror and it gave me an idea. The step toward dystopia was not the primary motivation for this project.

smithmayowa 9y ago
This is cool I remember trying to build a chrome extension for something like this a while ago for detecting and blocking images of animals people had phobia's for (e.g snake, spider and e.t.c) and I tried using pythons dlib object detector and shape landmarks predictor and it was a very stressful exercise in futility. Now I will have a look at mark r-cnn as it might help solve my problem and my few minutes of total brain fuckery after unlucky seeing a picture or a video with any kind of snakes in it, the big one's are of course worse.

krapp 9y ago

The Star Trek whose utopia needed a world war against the ethnic cleansing of genetically engineered Nazi supermen and an alien invasion to "civilize" humanity in the post-apocalyptic aftermath? After which which humankind just somehow evolved beyond the petty desires and violent impulses that had hitherto been baked into its primate genome for millions of years? I love Star Trek but one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, it's just a matter of perspective. And as far as technology goes, the original series predicted a couple of things, and we got a Space Shuttle named after the Enterprise, but most of it is magic and therefore useless to the real world. No matter how hard we work or how much we believe in ourselves we're never getting matter replication or transporters or holodecks that will create sentient life on command. We could look at the ideals of Star Trek, but remember that what we see is quasi-militaristic, autocratic and there is no real sign anywhere of privacy or freedom from the surveillance infrastructure of the computer. Even the transporters keep copies of people's entire genetic code.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pluma 9y ago
Depends. In TNG the outlook tends to be far more rosy than in DS9 or DIS. There were a few episodes which hinted at darker tendencies in Starfleet but those usually turned out to be corrupt individuals or some kind of alien influence. Having grown up with TNG my impression of the Federation was much like what the US was pretending to be prior to 9/11 (i.e. prior to "world police"), a beacon of liberty, equality and hope for mankind, but with all the ills of real-world USA eliminated by scientific progress and a more idealistic and altruistic society. The show had a few militaristic undertones initially but they mostly went away in season 2 and later, except for the ranks. The ranks and offensive capabilities are lampshaded a number of times but Picard and other characters frequently prove that those are just born out of necessity and for self-defense, never to attack. The Borg represent such a threat exactly because they are not interested in diplomacy and Starfleet has to fight an all-out war to survive them -- unlike the Romulans or Klingons who even at the worst of times mostly didn't outright attack them.