#random thoughts

Harpies who can't write or type or open most containers with their wings. Werewolves who worry about hurting someone if they get overstimulated at the wrong time. Minotaurs with digestive systems and metabolisms which require grazing throughout the day, not the three big meals humans are used to.

Lamias who have to stay home in the evenings and during cold months to stay warm, otherwise their muscles stop working right and they get stranded. And they're sick of their human friends suggesting they get some kind of tail sweater. It wouldn't help, the problem is that their body doesn't produce enough heat to begin with, and anyways a tail garment would get in the way of their rectilinear locomotion, and there's no way a sweater would survive being walked on in the first place. It feels like they don't actually care about you being stuck at home whenever they go out, they just want to feel like it's not their fault they never see you.

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.