Fire in the hole!
Oh would you look at that, resources and copyright are less important in a literal post-scarcity universe where everything is shared freely! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT!
TBF, even on TNG, there were characters who complain about how fake replicator food and synthahol are, and they have whole episodes on Holoaddiction.
It’s like fiction and reality are two different things.
I had this thought a long time ago. It’s not really wrong even.
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 than I was 20 years ago.
About as cognitive as “nazis just love their country and people”
Will Japanese holodeck programs have pixelation?
I fucking hate holodecks.
They are dangerous, psychologically destructive machines that have no place on earth. We have no idea what prolonged exposure to simulated environments does to the human brain. People are spending hours inside fake worlds instead of interacting with reality. Children are probably going to grow up thinking consequences aren’t real because their parents let them spend twelve hours a day fighting robots in a simulated medieval castle.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that the computer can generate literally anything you ask for.
That is not progress. That is an existential threat to society.
So, naturally, I have volunteered to personally test every single holodeck in the world.
Every last one.
I will spend as much time as necessary inside these horrible, dangerous machines so that nobody else has to endure the terrible psychological consequences of using them.
You are welcome.
Stop qualityposting in my shitposting community!
The hero we need but don’t deserve.
Thank you for your service.
Listen here you little shit…
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.
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.
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.
They are just going to start discussing the ethics of stolen training data
You can run it at home on your own local machine using solar power.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps OP is suggesting that if holodecks really were as powerful as the show suggests, they would have a much larger impact on the star trek universe than what is shown
I would argue star treks AI is constantly going wrong, and the fact that it can create objects which can actually harm you, is taken with a grain of salt by them.
Holodecks are incredibly dangerous, easily hacked, and the holo style workers they they, like the doctor on Voyager, will IMMEDIATELY TURN EVIL WHEN ANYTHING TOUCHES THEIR ETHICS SUBROUTINES!
Their use is AI should be terrifying to us.
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.
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.
Even in the future it breaks containment and endangers human life.
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?
Into the biofilters until some poor lower deck person empties it:
You’d think they’d just have one of the gen 1 EMHs do it. Maybe that weird non-descript industrial thing with pipes going everywhere we are shown them to be janitors for in that one scene was actually the jizz tubes beneath a holodeck 🤔
Literally the first episode of Lower Decks has someone off-hand mention having to empty the holodeck cum trap.
Meanwhile I got destroyed in another thread for saying Lower Decks was a low-brow gag comedy 🤷♂️
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 hussy
