With the advent of these models my head cannon now insists that when Star Trek characters say they "programmed" something, they really mean that they have a log of all of their iterative prompts and that there's some optimization the computer can use to aggregate all of those into the final resulting warp model/holodeck simulation/transporter filter/biobed pathogen detector/etc without having to reiterate through all of those prompts again...kind of like a NixOS declarative build.

And when somebody comes along and fixes their program or reprograms what they did, they simply insert or change some of the prompts along the way and get a different effect.

When the characters add new data to the computer (like the episode where Geordi added the psycho profile of the enterprise engine designer), they're just tuning the foundational model with some new input data.

Yeah....that feels right for now to me.

> Computer, show me a table.

> There are 5047 classifications of tables on file. Specify design parameters.

Interestingly enough, it seems existing AI models are already better than the Star Trek computer at dealing with ambiguity. Stable Diffusion would just generate a "normal" table and let you go from there.

"Computer, load up CELERY MAN, please"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8K6QUPmv8Q

LLMs and image models are already better than that scene

I can think of solutions for the physical component or simulating the perception of a physical component

I thought of this Running Man scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVdOr0z6X7Y