Can't stop thinking about The Voyager Conspiracy from a modern viewpoint. Like when they wrote it they were probably thinking of a pretty classic "getting overwhelmed with information fries the brain" or, I don't know if they had a statistician in there but it's pretty close to data dredging, which is where you take huge data sets and test literally everything whether it makes sense or not to raise the probability of finding a statistical correlation (tends to result in a lot of "eating ice cream causes drowning" results and maximizes random statistical biases and such. Bad, do not do).
But now. In the era of generative AI?
We're already getting articles on AI-induced psychosis - the result of having an echo chamber that is designed to always agree with you, find ways to keep you engaged, and give you the answers you want. It's a quick trip onto the conspiracy wagon, because if you ask ChatGPT(etc.) to connect two dots it'll do backflips making it sound logical, and then congratulate you on how clever you are for thinking of it. And that's a great feeling, so you do it again and again until you've dug yourself so far down the rabbit hole you've lost sight of the sky.
And that's... pretty much what happens to Seven of Nine, if you squint.
She tries to download the entire ship's computer. Desperate to find ways to sort and categorize the data, as human brains are wont to do, her brain starts trying to connect all of the disparate pieces together - to analyze it and build the "whole picture". So she starts finding random, disconnected data points that her brain insists are connected - that she wants to be connected. And look, she's solving such interesting problems - perfecting her brain and garnering praise from her colleagues.
And down the rabbit hole she goes.
I always find it interesting how well Star Trek (and other sci fi) often accidentally predict the future. I don't think the Voyager writers had conceived of generative AI and its results, but, well. The theory to conspiracy pipeline has certainly been around for a long, long time.
