I just read a piece by some clean-shirt who thinks watching TV as a kid was basic training for this AI slop we’re all drowning in. The argument, if you can call it that, is that Star Trek got us ready for the future. That Captain Kirk asking a disembodied voice for answers prepared us for asking a glorified search engine to write a poem about our cat. It’s a nice, neat little story. Tidy. Like a freshly made bed in a house that’s about to be demolished.
The whole premise is so naive it’s almost charming, in the way a puppy is charming right before it shits on your rug. The idea that we’ve been rehearsing for this moment? Sure. In the same way a man on death row has been rehearsing for the afterlife. It’s coming, whether you practiced for it or not, and it’s probably not going to be the heaven you were promised.
Let’s light a cigarette and break this down, piece by flimsy piece.
First, the talking computer on the Enterprise. The author seems to think this is the ancestor of Alexa and Siri. Beautiful. Except the computer on the Enterprise was a tool. It was a goddamn professional. You asked it to analyze a spatial anomaly, and it analyzed the goddamn spatial anomaly. It didn’t try to sell you a subscription to Nebula-of-the-Month club. It didn’t interrupt the analysis of a Klingon battle plan to tell you about a great deal on blood wine.
My phone, on the other hand, is a nervous, twitchy little bastard. It listens to me talking about my landlord and shows me ads for rope. It’s not a trusted partner; it’s a snitch in my pocket, a digital Judas that sells my misery for fractions of a penny. To compare that neurotic little nark to the stoic computer on the Enterprise is an insult to fictional computers everywhere.
Then there’s the tricorder. The little handheld gizmo that was the key to exploring strange new worlds. The author says it’s just like the iPhone in your pocket. An iPhone. Good Christ. A tricorder scanned for life forms, analyzed atmospheric compositions, and diagnosed alien plagues. It was a window to the universe.
The phone in my pocket is a window to a toilet wall. It shows me people screaming about politics, influencers selling face cream they’ve never used, and endless photos of food getting cold. It’s not a tool for exploration; it’s a tool for distraction. It’s a black mirror we hold up to escape the horror of our own faces, only to find an even greater horror waiting inside. We’re not scanning planets with these things; we’re scanning our own decaying souls for one last hit of dopamine before the lights go out. To suggest this is what Gene Roddenberry had in mind is madness.
And the holographic doctor. Oh, this is the best one. “A trusted, high-stakes partner.” A partner. I once had a partner who stole my rent money to bet on a three-legged horse. I’d trust that son of a bitch before I’d let some light-show with a perfect bedside manner diagnose my hangover. “Please state the nature of the medical emergency.” The emergency is that I’m talking to a fucking ghost. The emergency is that my cure for the shakes is a shot of bourbon, and you’re going to tell me my liver is a statistical probability.
Humanity, for all its filth and failure, is in the flaws. I want a doctor who looks tired, who smells faintly of coffee and regret, because that means he’s seen things. He knows that life isn’t a clean algorithm. It’s a messy, bloody, beautiful disaster. I don’t want a partner who can be turned off. I want one who’ll sit with me in the dark, even if he can’t fix a damn thing.
This brings us to the holodeck, the granddaddy of virtual reality. The author says to go try a Vision Pro. I’ve seen them. People sitting alone on their couches, swiping at ghosts in the air, a thousand-yard stare plastered on their faces behind a billion-dollar ski mask. The holodeck was about creating worlds to share with your crewmates. This new stuff? It’s about building a better, more expensive cage for one. It’s the loneliest invention in human history. Give me a sticky barstool, a jukebox that only plays sad songs, and a woman who laughs at my bad jokes. That’s my holodeck. It’s real. It smells. It disappoints. It’s glorious.
The real kicker here, the thing that sends this whole Star Trek fantasy crashing back to Earth, is what they left out. They mention HAL 9000 as a little footnote, a minor caveat. But they forget the real lesson. They forget the Borg.
“We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.”
Now that sounds familiar. That’s the real training we’ve been getting. Not from some optimistic space opera, but from every automated phone menu that drives you to madness, every 80-page user agreement you scroll past, every algorithm that decides what you see, what you want, and who you are.
We weren’t being prepped by Captain Kirk’s heroism. We were being broken in by the relentless, soul-crushing efficiency of the collective. The article talks about making AI “seamless, human, and emotionally aligned.” That’s just Borg propaganda with a marketing degree. “Seamless” means you won’t feel the tubes going in. “Human” means it will learn to fake a smile while it assimilates your job. “Emotionally aligned” means it will know exactly which of your weaknesses to exploit to make you comply.
They want to sand down the splinters of your personality until you’re a smooth, predictable, profitable little cog. They don’t want Data, the android who yearned to be human, with all its pain and poetry. They want a billion Datas who don’t yearn for anything but the next command.
So no, we weren’t trained for this by some lovely television show. We were trained by decades of being treated like numbers. We were trained by the slow, steady poisoning of everything real. The goal isn’t a utopian future where man and machine work in harmony. The goal is a world with no friction, no surprises, no drunken mistakes, no glorious failures. A world with no hangovers, because there was nothing worth celebrating the night before.
They can have it. They can have their seamless world of polite, helpful ghosts in the machine. I’ll be right here, with a cheap cigarette and a glass of something that burns on the way down. Proving my biological and technological distinctiveness with every shaky breath. They can beam themselves up. I’m staying down here with the rest of the doomed. The drinks are better.
Chinaski out. I need a refill.