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> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a

by latexr 1y ago

> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.

ants_everywhere 1y ago
People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  The states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    They were listening to people through their wall art. Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0]. The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time. At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is. [0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Not "just", the inspiration came from many angles: Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Spanish repression of POUM, Wartime Britain (where the shape of the TVs come from) and multiple other dystopian novels. People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist socialist.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I don't know too much about POUM, but my understanding was that in Homage to Catalonia he's concerned with the Spanish Communist Party's suppression of POUM. So I think that is consistent with what I said above. I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist states at the time.
    - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
      Indeed, communist repression of socialist ideas. I think the confusion comes from "surveillance of socialist countries in", where it should have been "Stalinist countries", not "socialist countries".
Thorrez 1y ago
>Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. >And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are more human problems than technological problems.
- latexr 1y ago
  They are human problems caused or exacerbated by misuse of technology. Mass surveillance and accruement of capital by private entities at this scale is only possible due to automation. What difference does it make, anyway? The distinction is meaningless when the result is the same. https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36 https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    Imo the distinction is very important in this context because there's a lot of technophobia and cynicism in general discourse, to the point where new developments in technology are often immediately met with extremely pessimistic takes re exploitation. It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that new developments in technology have both positive and negative potential, and how they're applied is largely due to sociological factors. When we dissociate the issues with "technology" we allow ourselves to see the underlying issues causing potential misuse, making progress at solving those problems possible instead of a knee-jerk negative lashback against anything new.
    - latexr 1y ago
      None of the problems I referenced are “new developments” in technology. The Snowden revelations happened over a decade ago. We know that Facebook hid their discoveries on social media harm, like a tobacco company. It is patently obvious by now that major developments coming out of big companies will be used to further encroach their dominance at the expense of every one else. It is not a knee-jerk reaction to recognise an obvious pattern and identify probable pathways for abuse. On the contrary, those have to be identified and discussed early if there is any hope of counteracting the problems. So no, it doesn’t make a difference to distinguish between the technological and human problem when we’re not solving the human problem. It is an excuse which could be applied to anything—technology doesn’t harm by itself, all of it is created by humans. That’s just a variant of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. It is important to recognise the role of technology in facilitating and worsening the human problem.
cogogo 1y ago
It wasn’t a tablet but there was a TNG episode about a time wasting game that nearly took over the minds of the entire crew.
- latexr 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
- proactivesvcs 1y ago
  They foresaw tiktok and their ilk way in advance.
TeMPOraL 1y ago
> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet of paper can display anything, but that you can have a lot of them, freely arrange them in front of you as you need, pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a single swab is strictly inferior to that. EDIT: >> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek > No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. We definitely do, and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us to the point of being close to having a basic universal translator as well. Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations, and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, translating directly to something you'd consider a "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part. The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers is that they understood natural language and intent. They could handle context and indirect references and all kinds of phrasings. This was the part we didn't know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have this. (Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except for the holographic technology.)
- latexr 1y ago
  > If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters? > is that they understood natural language and intent. Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
data-ottawa 1y ago
There are a few episodes about holodeck failures due to verbal instructions interpreted incorrectly (notably the Moriarty episode). Ship in a Bottle even has prompt injection when Moriarty figures out he can summon the arch. Plus, the captains ask tons of questions a computer would know, but only the bridge crew are trusted with.
balamatom 1y ago
The class divide might rather be likened to The Time Machine
proactivesvcs 1y ago
> And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs. Not disagreeing with you at all, but the surveillance on Starfleet vessels and facilities is almost complete and all-encompassing. Real-time location, bodily attributes, eavesdropping, access to all communication and computer data, personal and otherwise, I don't think there's anything that is private in their world! Remember that time The Doctor started a two-way video call with (I think) B'Elanna while she was in the shower? That being said, Starfleet is a paramilitary organisation, perhaps it's less awful in civilian life when one isn't wearing a Comm badge. I wonder if you and I would consider this degree of invasiveness an acceptable compromise with a life almost completely without illness, any form of capitalism and the opportunity to pursue pretty much any life path we wish, in a society which is largely at peace with itself.
mulmen 1y ago
> No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. “The computer is malfunctioning” has been a plot device in Star Trek since the beginning.
rotexo 1y ago
The stacks of tablets were because of DRM (a cybersecurity method to manage the threats of data exfiltration, “Digital Romulan Management”)
ben_w 1y ago
> Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard). On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".
HuaraHuara1 1y ago
We are also getting a Multipolar order, so a single government Earth is pretty far away, and so too with the 1984 Mega Governments. Surveillance is increasing in developed societies, but there are multiple underdeveloped nations that are currently under siege by their own citizens themselves. Not to mention we're unsure if these developed nations won't suddenly implode or come under fire by their own citizens to invoke mass change.

by latexr 1y ago

ants_everywhere 1y ago

People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
The states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  They were listening to people through their wall art. Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0]. The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time. At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is. [0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
Not "just", the inspiration came from many angles: Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Spanish repression of POUM, Wartime Britain (where the shape of the TVs come from) and multiple other dystopian novels. People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist socialist.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I don't know too much about POUM, but my understanding was that in Homage to Catalonia he's concerned with the Spanish Communist Party's suppression of POUM. So I think that is consistent with what I said above. I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist states at the time.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Indeed, communist repression of socialist ideas. I think the confusion comes from "surveillance of socialist countries in", where it should have been "Stalinist countries", not "socialist countries".

Thorrez 1y ago

>Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. >And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are more human problems than technological problems.

latexr 1y ago
They are human problems caused or exacerbated by misuse of technology. Mass surveillance and accruement of capital by private entities at this scale is only possible due to automation. What difference does it make, anyway? The distinction is meaningless when the result is the same. https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36 https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  Imo the distinction is very important in this context because there's a lot of technophobia and cynicism in general discourse, to the point where new developments in technology are often immediately met with extremely pessimistic takes re exploitation. It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that new developments in technology have both positive and negative potential, and how they're applied is largely due to sociological factors. When we dissociate the issues with "technology" we allow ourselves to see the underlying issues causing potential misuse, making progress at solving those problems possible instead of a knee-jerk negative lashback against anything new.
  - latexr 1y ago
    None of the problems I referenced are “new developments” in technology. The Snowden revelations happened over a decade ago. We know that Facebook hid their discoveries on social media harm, like a tobacco company. It is patently obvious by now that major developments coming out of big companies will be used to further encroach their dominance at the expense of every one else. It is not a knee-jerk reaction to recognise an obvious pattern and identify probable pathways for abuse. On the contrary, those have to be identified and discussed early if there is any hope of counteracting the problems. So no, it doesn’t make a difference to distinguish between the technological and human problem when we’re not solving the human problem. It is an excuse which could be applied to anything—technology doesn’t harm by itself, all of it is created by humans. That’s just a variant of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. It is important to recognise the role of technology in facilitating and worsening the human problem.

cogogo 1y ago

It wasn’t a tablet but there was a TNG episode about a time wasting game that nearly took over the minds of the entire crew.

latexr 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
proactivesvcs 1y ago
They foresaw tiktok and their ilk way in advance.

TeMPOraL 1y ago

> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet of paper can display anything, but that you can have a lot of them, freely arrange them in front of you as you need, pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a single swab is strictly inferior to that. EDIT: >> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek > No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. We definitely do, and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us to the point of being close to having a basic universal translator as well. Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations, and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, translating directly to something you'd consider a "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part. The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers is that they understood natural language and intent. They could handle context and indirect references and all kinds of phrasings. This was the part we didn't know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have this. (Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except for the holographic technology.)

latexr 1y ago
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters? > is that they understood natural language and intent. Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.

data-ottawa 1y ago

There are a few episodes about holodeck failures due to verbal instructions interpreted incorrectly (notably the Moriarty episode). Ship in a Bottle even has prompt injection when Moriarty figures out he can summon the arch. Plus, the captains ask tons of questions a computer would know, but only the bridge crew are trusted with.

balamatom 1y ago

The class divide might rather be likened to The Time Machine

proactivesvcs 1y ago

> And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs. Not disagreeing with you at all, but the surveillance on Starfleet vessels and facilities is almost complete and all-encompassing. Real-time location, bodily attributes, eavesdropping, access to all communication and computer data, personal and otherwise, I don't think there's anything that is private in their world! Remember that time The Doctor started a two-way video call with (I think) B'Elanna while she was in the shower? That being said, Starfleet is a paramilitary organisation, perhaps it's less awful in civilian life when one isn't wearing a Comm badge. I wonder if you and I would consider this degree of invasiveness an acceptable compromise with a life almost completely without illness, any form of capitalism and the opportunity to pursue pretty much any life path we wish, in a society which is largely at peace with itself.

mulmen 1y ago

> No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. “The computer is malfunctioning” has been a plot device in Star Trek since the beginning.

rotexo 1y ago

The stacks of tablets were because of DRM (a cybersecurity method to manage the threats of data exfiltration, “Digital Romulan Management”)

ben_w 1y ago

> Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard). On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".

HuaraHuara1 1y ago

We are also getting a Multipolar order, so a single government Earth is pretty far away, and so too with the 1984 Mega Governments. Surveillance is increasing in developed societies, but there are multiple underdeveloped nations that are currently under siege by their own citizens themselves. Not to mention we're unsure if these developed nations won't suddenly implode or come under fire by their own citizens to invoke mass change.