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I like to compare these models to the Star Trek main computer core. The computer on a starship is explicitly not self aware, but has to interface with humans through mostly voice comms. It has to give accurate information for ship operations, something the chatbots so far still get wrong on occasion (or slip up details)

The ships computer also doesn’t seem to do entertainment like “tell a bedtime story” , since holography exists and does a better job. Now those might be closer to chatbots current evolution.




This varied over the course of the show. In the first season, some writers assumed the computer was self-aware, and it even addressed a crew member as "Sir" at one point, interrupting them when it had enough information.

In later seasons it acts more like, well, a computer. Geordi does play (verbal) games with it in one episode, however, while bored on a shuttlecraft trip.


I have to look that Geordi episode up.

But I am mostly familiar with the later TNG era star trek, so I didn’t know it was written as self-aware in the early days.

Some episodes do feature “bugs” where holographic actors become aware being in a program/being an actor. The episode where an Irish town program has run too long on Voyager comes to mind.

(Edit: I do wonder if the holographic actors are somehow sandboxed containers in the main computer core, or run on a different system)


The episode is "The Mind's Eye".

But I think the Star Trek writers just didn't understand computers very well. In the future, making duplicate copies of data seems to be impossible. When you copy a file from one device to another, or one ship to another, or transmit it to a planet, it seems to disappear from the source.

This is a particularly common weirdness in Voyager, where duplicating holographic programs is apparently impossible. You can only move them.


“Something something quantum something, copying breaks the entanglement in the original processor”

I.e. they went all in on c++ 11 and everything is an rvalue reference.


Thanks for sharing the name of the episode. Something to watch today.

Maybe they figured out blockchain unique data structures that can’t be copied ;)




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