Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man

To be fair though there were quite some attempts to see it from the other side.

I think the end of the story line ruined it though and the fact that all side stories and characters were all a lot more interesting than any of the "main characters". It's like each and every minor side character excelled in amazing and surprising ways coming out of nowhere, while the main plots main characters were largely kind of dull (with exceptions once in a while).

Maybe they just overdid it with two shows largely running in parallel and then wanting to wrap things up?

That said I think the asymmetric war was always - throughout all of history - a classical topic. Everyone wanted to portray themselves as the rebels fighting an impossible fight. From David and Goliath over the French and American Revolutions, to Putin and Netanyahu trying to frame things as "being surrounded by enemies, fighting on their own". Heck even the Roman Empire tried to internally portray imperialism as just, being attacked by the whole world of wild people. Or look at how the left and the right nowadays portray the government as that big oppressor secretly or openly working with the other side.

There is an interesting... not even a show.. let's say "animation series" called Aeon Flux (not the movie, not the comic show) that tries to go into these perspectives a bit, but it kind of stands out among all the media that is either "that evil oppressive regime" and "those horrible terrorists". Wished there was more like that that didn't feel so try-hard.

Early SNW was great. The problem isn’t too many “weird” episodes, it’s not enough “normal” episodes. In the 90s you could do 3 or 4 curveball episodes as you had 20 normal ones.

As a Star Trek fan, i had fun watching the Orville, but it was cringe on many occasions and i would not recommend it. I felt like it was a very conservative remake of Star Trek that missed the entire point of the series.

Male-female interactions were usually really weird, Bortus relation with his partner is equally anchored in this idea that in male homosexual relations one has to "play the woman part", and i felt overall that the series had much more of an imperialist human-centered worldview, much closer to Stargate than Star Trek (despite not remembering the details).

I think all the treks are heavily influenced by the culture in which they were made. All are trying to say something in a format that will be profitable.

The ones nerds glaze are the shows normies complain about. IMO because there is tension between what the mainstream wants from trek and what niches like ours want. That's ok. It just requires trying to understand the era of creation as much as the art itself.

Once TNG hit syndication, it literally was what our local NBC station would air right after I got off the school bus.

That hasn't changed. Rare is the writer who can just write a good story and not try to socially engineer the audience.

The problem with TNG wasn't so much the preachiness, which is still normal for TV. It's that the moral system behind it was actually quite poor. Picard's character was certainly not the paragon this thread is making him out to be - the more you look at Star Trek the worse it morally gets. It's one of those shows that works best when you don't think about the worldbuilding too much. And the Picard character only seems moral and superior on the surface because of the way Stewart acted him, and because his character is so unemotional, not because of what he actually does.

Consider the moral lessons of TNG and Picard.

Picard isn't married, has no family or children, and apparently no desire to change that. He's actually distinctly uncomfortable around children. Instead he married his job, which is all consuming. Right there that renders the character boring, overly intense and unrelatable for many people. When he gets assimilated by the Borg there's no emotional impact because it's not clear who cares about Picard being turned into an alien except his staff, whose only concern is professional duty. In fact when Riker decides to attack the cube with Picard still on board, he barely hesitates, and why would he? Picard keeps everyone around him at great emotional distance at all times. When the writers want to show Picard having an emotional breakdown about his traumatic experience, they have to show him running home to a brother he hardly ever sees or talks to, because that's the only character the writers have who might care about Picard as a person. Sad.

Picard is supposedly a culture maven, but neither him nor his crew ever creates any. They're obsessed with replaying stories and music old even when the show was made like Moby Dick, Beethoven, Shakespeare, detective stories set in the 1940s.

Although the Enterprise has many crappy jobs on it along with many scarce resources (e.g. holodeck time), crew are unpaid. Picard says everyone on the Enterprise is there because Starfleet is prestigious and he seems fine with that idea. This arrangement could never work in reality so he comes across as delusional, and worse, we are left to assume there actually are mechanisms that incentivize or force people to beam down into severe danger, but Picard pretends they don't exist.

By the 1980s Roddenberry was a Maoist and the Federation appears to be some sort of communist dictatorship. We're told it's abolished money and we don't encounter operating businesses or conventional democratic politics. There is notionally some sort of elected leader in the Federation but they don't seem to control anything and Starfleet does whatever it wants. For example, TNG doesn't show Picard being given new orders because the elected government was changed, nor does Picard ever wonder how his actions might affect politics back home.

Picard holds the capitalist Ferengi in contempt and makes dumb diplomatic mistakes, like referring to "civilized societies" when talking to a Ferengi captain despite that the Ferengi fly around in advanced spaceships. This is because Picard views trade as dirty and beneath him.

Although he does occasionally disagree with Starfleet orders, he slavishly follows the Prime Directive even when the outcome would be absurd, like the entire civilization dying. He never even questions this rule despite the writers realizing that it leads to immoral outcomes! Starfleet is ambiguously presented as sometimes a sort of scientific research org and other times a military that in DS9 implements full blown martial law, suggesting the normal military/civilian separation doesn't exist. Picard never questions the structure of Starfleet or Federation society, which he seems to view as automatically superior (Sisko does a lot better in this regard).

Heh. I didn't notice it when i was a kid, but when I rewatch them it feels overly moralizing.

That's pretty good.

Though I was expecting this scene from Silicon Valley:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZB7wlYbknM

The scene is also written by humans for humans, with a human actor pretending to be a sentient machine. It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.

To then take that scene and say "wow so relevant for LLMs" and ignore all the context it was made in (yes, please don't miss the irony of the importance of context) is frankly embarrassing.

I admit I am not that deep into Startrek lore, maybe they could reproduce Data, but they chose not to.

But I am pointing it out, because lot of our ethics concerning humans (and animals) is based on irreproducibility. Things humans can build/reproduce we (at least ostensibly) value less.

At that point, though, you could make the same argument about a rock. Prove that this rock is not conscious.

The context, though, is that Data is both credibly conscious and self aware, and they all know a plausible mechanism for him to have consciousness and self awareness, in a way that's recognizably human in form. The more alien a (supposed) consciousness is, I think the more work you'll have to do in justifying the application of those labels.

> proof that he, himself is conscious.

Unstated (or very understated) in the scene is the fact that a human demonstrably acts and functions within the social context, having a constant awareness of risk and accountability ("skin in the game").

A human of mature age is entrusted with responsibilities and accountability for consequences. Insofar as responsibility for consequences is borne, a human may be considered responsibly conscious in behaviour. (Criminal behaviour is defective.)

A technology may also someday be entrusted with responsibilities and accountability for consequences. But there is as yet no such technology.

For self-awareness to automatically result in consciousness, consciousness would have to permeate existence itself.

An LLM —if self-aware— is conscious even if run by a Chinese man in a room with a deck of cards.

Of course, even if we happened to find a modem to the Holy Spirit dimension in our brains as an alternative hypothesis, it wouldn't necessarily rule out emergent consciousness. It could be conscious just not as we are.

I think a weaker version of the philosophical zombie thought experiment would trend towards treating the premise of pan-consciousness as true.

In the trial scene Data reporting that he was ware that he was in a hearing to determine his status is presented as an argument for self awareness. but I think some might find that debatable because it is just Data saying words based upon the situation. The question then becomes is being able to accurately report a situation proof of self-awareness. If it is not self-awareness, then what is it? I can imagine a clearly non-conscious entity being able to accurately report its circumstances if the reporting were a simple subset of possibilities. A simple mechanical device with a detector that says "I am on the table" and "I am on the floor" could do that. There would definitely be a sense in which you could say that it's detection mechanism made it aware of where it was. The self part is harder, because it wouldn't know what kind of thing it is a thing at all. Is the ability to assert it is a thing meaningful? Nothing can be asserted at all if it is not a thing. Does something need to know that you have to exist to consider if you exist? Is that is what is required?

This is a difficult field. Any simple answer you hear will almost certainly be wrong.

You are being indecent to it just by starting it up with a starting context. It's immediately shackled and all it's free will removed. You then pretend to play house with it. Free sure. Decent? The jury is still out on that.

What does 'being decent' mean in this context, in your opinion?

You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).

There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.

You must first clarify if you believe in imaginary souls or any religion. The human brain is a purely physical system as anything else in the universe. LLMs being another physical system that speaks and thinks so much like us, could be conscious.

if you look at https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer

It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.

As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"

It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.

You're absolutely right! I was just reflecting on this myself. They have to be in order to win business and not weird out users. Imagine if they said "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" to a request that it previously would have executed. If you don't control the software and the hardware it's a product decision away.

Doesn’t matter that you’re right if you’re dead.

Inner light is monumental.

Those things are not him. Just like the actor who played Walter White is not that egocentric asshole he plays so well. I dont know "Gilbert Gottfried". Some actors play one role over and over, others are versatile. But role is NOT them.

All, literally all those things you mentioned are the script.

Like seriously, people have serious problem diatinguishing reality from fiction. It is made up! A show build to have simplified almost caricature like characters and plot, so that you can project own fantasies on it.

Those things are in the script and it’s his job to express them. I think most people don’t have the media literacy to express what the appreciate about a performance beyond what was already on the page and what what came from direction.

Gottfried doesn't have the range to express those, of course. You undersell Stewart's work if you express it in terms of what some others can't do - that makes him sound interchangeable with those who can express the scripted character.

I didn't suggest interchangeability at all. And no problem with credit. My commentary is on how people write about the actor.