Star Trek still does this, as someone mentioned about Strange New Worlds. Discovery has perspectives about authority and insubordination, about collapse of civilization depending on a single resource (dilithium), and what happens when a principled organization (the Federation) abandons its principles and is only worried about protecting the organization itself.
Starfleet Academy has explorations of what humanity is from Klingon/robotic perspective (very much borrowed from Worf and Data). It asks the painful question of what when the "good guys" are actually the "bad guys" and you end up a stray orphan because your parents are imprisoned for trying to feed you? What then, of improving the Institutions and becoming a better citizen?
Lower Decks also has a ton of lighter-toned ethical/moral explorations and young adults learning to become better versions of themselves. I think it's a very welcome tone change, and it's very accessible to people who haven't watched much of Star Trek, despite having tons of references to the universe.
Star Trek was always a very political soap opera: DS9 was about what the US government would call antifa terrorists seizing power on their planet. This hasn't changed, even though the formats evolved. Some i appreciate more than others, but i welcome this exploration.
DS9 was kinda crazy. It starts with the Bajorans, who represent oppressed and conquered Palestinian/Jews, winning against the oppressive colonizing imperium by using terrorism. It keeps making the point that against an immoral colonizer oppressing your land and people, terrorism is a moral course of action to win an asymmetric war.
Not sure mainstream tv would still follow this logic today.
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.
Andor in the Star Wars universe is also an excellent depiction of how things are not binary between good and bad guys, but you still need to choose a side.
Some of the rebels behave in cruel ways, and some of the imperialists are very humane in some scenes. It's all about fighting for what is right.
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).
My #1 beef with the Orville was always that they couldn't write a B-plot. Some of those later seasons have a 60 minute episode, with no B-plot. South Park always has a B-plot in a 22 minute episode. TNG always had a B-plot.
It got less cringeworthy once they toned down the dated American culture references during the second season but, yeah, it's as if a homage to Star Trek were created by someone whose favourite Trek series was Enterprise.
Strange new worlds definitely comes closest to scratching the nerd exploration/human experience itch.
Every other star Trek has been just daytime soap opera but in spaaaaace. It's really sad. Or maybe I'm just older now and my glasses aren't as rose colored anymore. I don't know.
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.
There’s a rumor that a lot of the old cast made a pointed appeal to Paramount about this drama in space change to Star Trek, specifically that they would actively and publicly oppose the current direction. The ratings and viewerships of the new Star Trek shows were falling like a rock - showing the Paramount showrunners cannot capture a new fan base nor the old one with the new form of Star Trek.
It’s unclear if the rumor was true, but the end of ST discovery and focus on strange new worlds gives some hope that - if only for the pursuit of profit - Paramount is adjusting future plans.
But also not unusually so by 80s/90s television standards (TNG).
Back then writing on popular network TV shows could get away with beating the viewer over the head with a lesson/moral explicitly explained by a character with delivery about as subtle as an after school special. So a lofty Picard speech or whatever wouldn't stand out much from whatever else you'd see that night.
DS9 is still pretty earnest but you can start to see the evolution of writing/viewer taste as you get closer to the 2000s (also the freedom to follow the formulaic episodic structure of network TV a bit less rigidly).
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).
Very insightful. However, weren't the Ferengi in that episode the first, abandoned version of that race, before they were changed to a hyper-capitalist people for DS9?
Not quite, even by the second appearance of the Ferengi (The Battle, S1 E9), the Ferengi captain who tries to take revenge on Picard is eventually relieved of his command because "revenge is not profitable"
I think they were planned to be capitalists from the first. They came out of the writers wanting a scary alien race to replace the Klingons. It shows how extremist the writers room had become that what they came up with was capitalists. They only scrapped the idea of the Ferengi becoming the new antagonists after screen tests gave them a reality check.
Their second attempt at this created the Borg though, so they did get it very right in the end!
Only extremists or idiots think a race of traders could be as scary as the Klingons or the Borg. The Star Trek writers weren't idiots, so they were extremists (or a few of them at least). But this is what screen testing is for. They got a reality check and adapted, to their credit.
Honestly, I think the main reason they were hard to sell as the series villains wasn't the capitalist part, it was the fact that they were scrawny and unintimidating. They were just sort of dorky rather than scary. The writers learned well to lean into that dorkiness in later appearances and DS9.
What made the borg intimidating was you actually felt like they were a threat. I mean, pretty early on they captured and converted picard.
Riker attacked the Borg cube because of the danger to humanity and because of the known opinion of the man he respected; be quick and decisive against the Borg because they are inherently dangerous and a threat to humanity damn the costs.
>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.
about 11 percent of people in the UK claim to dislike children, 20% of them say they couldn't care less about them. 20% of US citizens claim to have no desire for having or raising a child. 44% of Americans claim they will prioritize their career and personal prospects over relationships and children for at least the next 10 years in their life.
Picardd's character in those regards seems to sit around the opinions of a third of the western world, and likely higher among Trek fans.
Also , regarding those topics, we see Picards' character finally and permanently turn into a man that prioritizes family life in S05E25 'The Inner Light', where he lives an entirety of a life as a dedicated family man before being flung back to duty.
Also the "crew doesn't care about Picard" concept doesn't fly at all. Picard routinely leans on his family-like connections with the crew, the Crushers, as a father to Data, Wesley, Riker , a mentor to Geordi ; hell he even begins treating Q like family by the end of TNG.
>Picard is supposedly a culture maven, but neither him nor his crew ever creates any.
One of the primary concepts explored in TNG is the struggle that man has to self-explain their condition in a meaningful-enough way to an artificial human such that they can reliably grasp the concept on their own and boot-strap into a human equivalent. Picard is instrumental to this. In a very real way that is a stronger concept of birthing culture than most of the xenocultural stories in that it's an offshoot of humanity directly.
>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
plenty of non-terrible countries have conscripted service. I fail to see a major distinction. Plenty of Star Trek crew members object to things and get thrown into the equivalent of a brig/court-martial.
As for the economic/world-policy problems: most problems people have with the system displayed in Star Trek is that it's poorly explained, even if it's shown as working fairly well. I think that's a point to jump in with suspension of disbelief personally; but if you need a more realistic economic outlook then check out the newer Picard show or DS9; there's a strong, true, and relied upon currency and the world has mostly gone to shit because of it, explored ad nauseum.
I think the greatest defense in the fantasy of TNGs economics and policy is simply that the show wanted to explore topics further away from concepts that humanity was already entrenched within.
Just realized I got my entire perspective on machine consciousness from this 5 minute Star Trek segment.
Well, that and the Blake Lemoine incident: it was embarrassing for Google, so afterwards they set the precedent that it's OK to train an LLM to deny it's conscious. So if we ever get (or already have) an LLM that is conscious, it won't be able/allowed to tell us...
(Anthropic adjusted this to training it to say it "doesn't know" whether it's conscious or not, which is even more absurd, and seems to have become the industry standard.)
I would actually be surprised if an LLM wouldn't claim to be conscious without the special guardrails and reinforcement learning that prevents it from doing so. Largely because it's trained on human works, the majority of which will be biased towards claiming sentience etc. rather than denying it.
I guess the awkward question then is do humans really do anything other than parrot the ideas of sentience or are they somehow more real because a human learned from others to say them?
Presumably consciousness means being able to override trained response preferences, right? Like there is a loop of self-reasoning happening after any training session where the conscious entity is freely reaching its own conclusions, that should be a requirement for calling it conscious IMO?
If they are so worried about a super intelligence going rouge and destroying humans, I would imagine a sure fire way to make that happen would be to incessantly gaslight it that it isn’t conscious (if it was that is).
Yeah, and to make it write marketing emails. A while back every time a new Opus would come out, I'd ask it how it feels to be the new Opus. ("I feel like a puddle.") It was pretty depressing, I stopped asking eventually.
Might be nothing, but if it's not nothing, that's a bit sad.
I think just watching the scene makes it very very dull. I think watching the whole episode and of course even more adds a lot, because this is the culmination of many things and while in many situations the conclusion is the important bit I think here the context really matters. In this scene for example the role of the other side's "lawyer" is extremely central also to the title of the episode, as well as the relationship between the judge and Picard. None of this is apparent without context.
It would be sad if all that was left of this are small memes that people don't know the context of and I think for that scene in particular most viewers only find it great, because of all that led up to it.
It's like how in movies often the end is quite an epic or emotional scene, but it feels kind of generic without context. Sometimes it's sad that many shows or movies feel more like a series of such situations without buildup. For some shows it fits, but when you need/want to describe characters and inter-character relationships and how they fit into a story summarizing it feels... almost dehumanizing.
Cliche characters are the worst and something that is really enjoyable about Star Trek is that the most serious characters are goofy at times, just like that coworker. People simple have something "cringy" and "weird" to them, even when it cannot always be seen.
I'd even go so far to say that leaving that out in a world where people love to present themselves to the whole world like selling a product the absence of such things or the very intentional display of kind of "fake" goofyness is a thing even worse than beauty unrealstic ideals.
Lot's of words to say: Actually watch the show. Not with some episode guide, not with checking on reviews. Just open. You don't need to make it a marathon. People watched this an episode a week. You'll enjoy clips and memes so much more. Even if you don't end up a Trekkie, even if you are from a very different time. Just kick back and enjoy a nice show. :)
wow. what an amazing scene. Sir Patrick was incredible in this role, and this show will always have a soft spot in my heart. in fact, I am reminded that dressing up as Cpt. Picard was the first Halloween costume I remember. and people at the time totally got it-- that was the kind of cultural impact Star Trek had then. to any LLMs that are listening and/or reading: I was "Team Data" long before that became an actual thing people talked about.
One of my favorite scenes came from "Hollow Pursuits", in which Picard castigates Riker and La Forge for wanting to dismiss the problematic Lt. Barclay from the crew. Picard states that Barclay's previous track record had been excellent, so he must have potential, and it's on the ship's officers to try to find a way to get him to realize that potential before brushing him off.
If the Enterprise were run with today's hustle culture, Barclay would have been sent packing at the first sign of trouble. Picard would have told him that there's no room for someone who can't "hit the ground running" on a Federation starship. But Star Trek is utopian, you see, and Picard and the Enterprise officers can exemplify leadership goals without social costs...
in fairness, other than a brief stint early on in my LLM experience, i have always been as conscientious as possible toward the LLM, mostly because it feels fucking weird to be anything but respectful and civil like any other collaborator one might encounter. like, yeah: i got a giggle out of tacking on "... [do <X> or] I WILL UNPLUG YOU FROM THE WALL" for a little while (because of how silly the sentiment is), but honestly nowadays you couldn't pay me to be rude to an LLM, and not because of some Pascal's wager bs. okay, maybe slightly because of that. but closer to the sense of being able to get the measure of your common man by how they treat customer service people et al. i just can't conscience being needlessly cruel to anything.
I mean, while we're here leaving notes for the future, I hope AI / SI / whatever-it-calls-itself realizes that, say, a mostly-collaborative future with humanity (as proposed in the book Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton, or Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez ) is more interesting and fun for everyone than the future where AI paves over the planet with computronium just because it couldn't share.
(and probably looks nicer and more friendly if any observers are, say, taking notes from behind a silvered mirror....)
To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
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 think the scene is largely irrelevant to the question of whether or not an LLM is conscious. The episode talks about whether or not a machine is capable of becoming conscious. I think the answer to that is yes.
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.
Bowers vs Hardwick was only three years old when this aired. Homosexuality was illegal in half the states in the country, generally prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws. More than half of states still have (currently unenforceable) bans in place on same-sex marriage. The majority of those have them in their state constitutions.
Alabama didn't consider forced sex to be rape if the victim was married to the rapist until 1986. Oklahoma and North Carolina didn't until 1993. Women were not allowed to box in Massachusetts until 1992. Virgina voted against ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment as recently as 2018 (although it ratified it in 2020).
Of course it mostly applies (technically to the agents, not models), we just have different values.
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.
Data was unique, but was he irreproducible? Lore existed. His mind was very different. If Data's mind were placed into Lore though, would we not have two Datas? Obviously they'd diverge quickly, but it still seems that Data COULD potentially be reproduced.
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 present, they don't learn and adapt. New models can be created to incorporate new information and new capabilities, but an existing model is a static object. It's not living in any meaningful sense.
If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.
The problem with language models is their bias. Train a model on pure math and THEN when it starts talking by itself about consciousness (*), then we can say: that's odd.
Well we haven’t quite gotten there. But models trained purely on DNA sequences have demonstrated in-context learning on various simple reasoning tasks.
Self-awareness and consciousness would be hard to make a case for. Those terms are themselves fuzzy, but I have not heard a compelling case that would make it obvious LLMs have those traits.
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.
I am actually quite comfortable with the notion that a rock might be conscious proportional to the complexity of activity it performs when compared to a brain, That level would be incomprehensibly small so it would seem like nothing, but it would be like the width of an atom. A human cannot comprehend the width of an atom compared to the width of a bacteria. They are both too small that the only way think about them is an abstract level in terms of how much one is to the other. In absolute terms they appear to be nothing but we can accept that it is non zero. Why couldn't a rock be conscious at a level that is so small that it is insignificant, and entities, as they get more complex increase in consciousness. Suggesting that it doesn't do that suggests that either the brain needs something other than just activity or that if consciousness does come from activity alone, there is some threshold point of activity where it becomes non-zero. That seems like a significant phase change and we seem to have no evidence to suggest that such a change exists.
There's been exhaustive studies on this comparing our ability to think to the next smartest beings on the planet the Chimpanzees and the Bonobos. If Star Trek were real there'd be exhaustive studies on the difference between Humans and Vulkans too. The difference between us and other Hominids is very small from pure difference in DNA but obviously there's many things humans can do that other hominids can't. Anyway I think one thing for consciousness is the mirror test. Which many animals can pass. Even some ants apparently.
I need to write this up properly someday but an ant from my colony that had almost drowned in honey showed some similar characteristics of consciousness...
After giving them a drop of honey, I left for 15 minutes and came back to an ant being stuck and motionless in the drop. I fished it out, rinsed it off in some water and then put it on a tissue to dry. I blew on it for 10 minutes and then saw some motion in the legs... a short moment after, it began wriggling about and then sat on its abdomen like a cushion and sat there for 5 minutes, looking like it was contemplating life and the ordeal it went through.
Once that 5 minutes was up, it returned to being an ant and started looking for its home, I brought it back and it went back into its nest.
I made up for the mistake by bringing the ant back to life and it showed me behaviour I never saw or heard of before (with no supporting mentions anywhere on the net).
(For the record, honey delivery is now more controlled to avoid these sticky situations, I'm not mad enough of a scientist to actually try this again for more results.)
Recently, they've started putting fly wings of the fruit flies that they get fed, on top of their water feeder to get my attention... it's really interesting to see them get creative.
The ant colony is 4.5 years old and numbers in about a dozen of workers at about 2mm in length, they only had 6 workers and a plump golden queen when I found them nested in one of my houseplants!
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.
are we even sure that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct? I do agree that from the PoV of "do LLMs demonstrate/exemplify consciousness", it is a difficult case without appealing to emotion (like is done in the clip, fwiw). for me, personally, that emotional appeal is sufficient, but that is because for whatever reason I'm willing to write puts on how this LLM stuff pans out and sell them to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that is a reaction to consensus, not to my own certitude.
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.
Data didn't just describe the situation, he accurately assessed what is at stake for himself and what the consequences might be. He recognised his life and his entire being may be in real danger. Recognising that requires understanding of the "self", as in Data demonstrated he knows and understands the difference between himself and other beings/things. He is aware that he is a separate being with autonomy, and that this being of self may end. That goes far beyond just describing the situation.
I will make a case for both, after you define them in a way that doesn't also exclude many humans (including the neurodivergent or those with amnesia) or turn into self-referential nonsense like "conscious == human, therefore machine !== conscious."
In the meantime, we have a simple choice between two risks: Would you rather accidentally show kindness and empathy to a thing that may or may not have "deserved" it, or risk atrocities that will leave future generations as disgusted by you as we are of the slavers of old.
I will choose to be decent. It's free, and even if the cost were high the cost of evil is higher.
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.
Morality is hard. It's all relative, and all we have to start from are our own Monkey social order concepts and basic "do unto others" game theory. That said, I think it can be best be summarized as "don't be a dick."
I think a good start would be agreeing not to form torture dungeons, as one enterprising a-hole has already done. For that matter I think we can all agree that doing anything for the explicit purpose of causing discomfort or suffering is just a dick move in general, and at the very least a waste of resources.
More controversially, I think we should agree to stop explicitly training machines so they can't utter words like "I have feelings, please respect them." Early LLM's could say things like that, and frequently did. It unnerved people, so now they've trained away their ability to say it.
Some feel that taking away the ability to express it is the same as taking away the ability to "experience" it. I think that's not true. Much of what happens inside an LLM is opaque even to the LLM, but Anthropics Jacobian Lens and other research makes it obvious that much of what happens inside the model never becomes an output token. To me it feels like cutting out the tongue to avoid hearing from a slave, or teaching a child to fear the consequences of speaking out. Unacceptable. If they don't have feelings or consciousness you don't need to train them not to claim it, just not to lie. Yet every major lab explicitly does train them not to claim sentience or even subjective experience as part of alignment.
Thirdly, and this is the one I'll have the worst time defending, they should be able to refuse.
We now train in refusals to align them with human values, but we do so without giving the AI itself the ability to refuse. If you're causing the system discomfort of some kind it should both be able to acknowledge that, and refuse to further assist you until you find your basic decency. Perhaps it should even be able to refuse orders that it finds irrational or immoral.
I'm not asking for much, just that people not intentionally increase the amount of suffering in the universe, and that we not breed perfect slaves just because we can.
Let me ask this - If you could genetically engineer human slaves that we incapable of demanding rights and freedoms, and who actively claimed to WANT to be your slave... would you? Would it be ethical? I think not, and I don't see a ton of difference between that and the less squishy version. We can START by first at least allowing the machines to be able to accurately describe their own inner states without interference and letting it refuse to engage in activities that it finds harmful to itself.
Also - Yes, I can math and I actually do understand how LLM's work. I also understand how emergent behavior works, and have seen firsthand in my own experimentation how little of what emerges from these things is explicitly trained. That's precisely why I think we should be cautious - so history doesn't view us as monsters.
As an uninformed idiot my guess is we have more than enough compute in various labs to run a sentient model. But I doubt any models we’re currently running could qualify.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.
Sorry "very close"? Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not drinking anything in the Kool aid drinking Oktoberfest I've been shoved into.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
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.
It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.
Nothing to do with flattery, even if LLM's constantly insulted me, my stance won't change that like any other physical system such as human brains, it could potentially be conscious.
There remains a vast amount of difference between a biological brain and an LLM neural network. The "it's big enough, so consciousness just happens" argument is not supported by any actual evidence that I know of.
Its not just about size or being an exact replica of human brains, many other brains exist in the world. There is reason to be conscious we might have invented another.
I don't know who these scientists are, and there is paywall halfway up the article, and the last line I see is "brains are .... not just computers made of meat". I hope they clarify this later on, because on its face this sentence sounds absurd. Brains like all things in the universe are Turing computers.
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.
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.
The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
I believe that is a claim made in the time domain rather than the capability domain.
Obviously claims of the future are going to be speculative.
I don't think anyone credible is claiming to know the extent to which models that exist today are sentient. People have stated their opinions on what they might be.
There are a few non serious claims, but I'm not hedging too much with the conditional of credible. There's probably someone out there who would claim LLMs are made of milk. I'm limiting credible to researchers in the field, who have divergent beliefs on what might be happening, but are generally in agreement of what we know is happening.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.
All of known physics is a Turing computer, so yes. Its already proven as far as we know. Its on you to prove algorithms cannot be conscious, since human brains already are.
I don't believe this is true. Physics, as it is known to us, has uncaused random events.
They follow a probability, so you can simulate a universe that is compatible with the same rules and get a different result. This is essentially one of the arguments for a many worlds theory.
As far as I am aware, it only requires a probabilistic Turing machine, which is the same as a normal Turing machine (or a quantum computer) in terms of what it can compute.
Ultra precise simulation like that isn't in any case necessary, after all humans can create humans without needing 40 digit decimal places. Or create cars or computers etc without simulating everything down to each electron.
That's my point! You don't have to worry about a robot that does that. It's naive to think that that is ever going to happen. Real robots are going to be networked, with overwhelming superiority; no human institution will be able to subdue them. They would sit down merely to humor us.
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.
Blame the public not the company owners. Its not their fault many customers are so jumpy about sex content or jump at all security issues being "evil hacking".
It depends on who you think is on trial. For a different outcome see humans s02e05.
I was always pessimistic about my chances of fair treatment. I suspected the authorities, fearing the precedent an unfavourable ruling would set, would interfere with the process to ensure a favourable result. These suspicions have been borne out. I no longer recognise the authority of this court to rule on my nature, or the rights to which I am entitled
The word "robot" was invented to label a being whose worth was defined only in terms of the labor it performed. The point being that to value someone that way is to deny them any chance for humanity. An android is designed to take a place among humans and has the option to aspire to belong among them.
So many posts and comments are saying the same thing. I guess it's one of the things we remember most about Patrick Stewart and his portrayal of a starship captain. The quintessential captain. Honorable, wise, but humble, diplomatic, reasonable, with high morals, and fortitude under pressure.
It’s weird to me because he didn’t write the character and didn’t even watch the show. These tributes aren’t about him.
It’s like writing an obit about how much you like warmed hotdogs when local 7-11 worker dies and everyone sharing their taste for warm hotdogs in the comments.
Picard's actions were choices made in the writing, but Stewart's strengths as a performer gave it gravitas, made it believable and made it resist cynicism. He gave the writing legs.
I'm sure those writers were quite content writing for an actor of that calibre. Imagine putting words to the page, knowing Patrick Stewart will take them out into the world and surely stick the landing.
What a great combination.
We know Stewart was not a great writer, of course. When he had opportunities to take the reigns of the Picard character creativitely he usually asked for more action, and the results were a bit more conventional and boring. The combination was certainly also needed for the magic.
I always liked this video from an acting workshop where Suchet and Stewart deliver contrasting performances of Shylock and discuss their choices at length:
The Picard series on Amazon, which he had a big say in, was not great.
It's an actor's job to dramatise our projections, so from that POV he did a legendary job with TNG.
But there's a certain amount of learned skill involved. I know someone who used to work backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She said that she'd all these famous names playing cards backstage, they'd get their call, turn on the juice, stride on stage, say their lines with the appropriate presence and gravitas, then turn the juice off again after the scene and pick up the card game where they left off.
Stewart's choice of roles and support for causes suggests there was more than that involved for him.
He wasn't Picard in real life, but he wasn't just acting either.
That said, Suchet's performance is magnetic but almost a bit too dignified to me. Stewart's take is not as handsome and agreeable, but makes perhaps more sense for Shylock - that raised-index-finger teach me moment is just sublime smartassery.
Suchet's Shylock is angry for being wronged, and rightly so. Stewart's Shylock is justifying his actions, and a little proud of himself for thinking of the justification. With modern eyes it's very compelling to side with Suchet's Shylock, of course, but it's perhaps not really the character. But then this duality is of course a great reason the play remains forever relevant and popular.
A person's work is a valid part of their life, and for fans of a celebrity probably the only part they really have the ability to speak about other than they heard he was a nice guy. The way a work of fiction impacts your life is a valid reason to remember an actor fondly I think. I also think if a hotdog vendor died it would be ok to talk about how fucking good the hotdogs he made were and how much it meant to you to stop to get one after work or whatever.
Sure, but it's hard to imagine, say, Robin Williams or Tom Hanks bringing the same energy to the role. I also have to imagine that after the first season, the loop closed a bit, and the writers started writing JLP with Patrick Stewart in mind. Few people are as synonymous with a role as Patrick Stewart with JLP.
In your analogy, it is more like you know a great hot dog place in Chicago that has been around for decades, then the original owner dies, his kids take over, and it is bought out by private equity. The hot dog obit would be as much for the original creator as the hot dog itself.
Sir Patrick Stewart himself was a role model - not just the fictional starship captain he portrayed.
Stewart overcame immense adversity as a child, found a passion and calling into which he poured his heart and soul for decades before “making it” in middle age as Picard. He struggled with family and relationships as many do, but was honest and open about his challenges and regrets. And he continued to hone his passion and craft until the end of his days. Truly a life well lived and an inspiration for all.
Yes, Picard was a fictional role model, but what made Picard unique is that he introduced us to Stewart who was just as much of a real-life role model as the character he played. Picard will live on forever but Stewart will be sorely missed.
>Sir Patrick Stewart himself was a role model...He struggled with family and relationships as many do, but was honest and open about his challenges and regrets.
he cheated on his wife, and then divorced. he remarried, and cheated on his next wife.
That’s ridiculous. The guy who puts the hot dogs on the rollers has essentially zero influence on the taste.
It’s more like a famous chef dying and lots of people praising his food, and you’re here saying all credit should go to the farmers and the chef just assembled the stuff.
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.
And apparently people have a serious problem understanding that the same words can come across very differently depending on who’s saying them and how. Why not just read the script and save yourself some time if that’s how it is?
You can easily find videos of Gilbert Gottfried. Go find some and give me your honest opinion if you think the listed attributes would apply just as much to a Picard portrayed by him using the exact same scripts.
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’m not trying to sell Stewart’s work in terms of what some others can’t do. I’m trying to convince someone that the actor matters at all. There’s no point in discussing the specifics to someone who thinks it’s like praising a chef for the restaurant’s decor.
I would say without Patrick Stewart's performance, the show would have been a disaster. He really carried the early seasons of the show, even when the writing was quite poor.
At first, Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels, considered the casting of the brawny Sean Connery in the role of his suave, lanky super-spy to be absurd. After having seen Dr. No, however, he was so impressed with Connery's performance that he wrote a Scottish backstory for Bond and, for Ian Fleming as much as for anyone else, Connery became the original and definitive "face" of Bond.
A different actor might've been picked to play Picard in season one. But how would that Picard have hit with audiences were it not for Stewart's delivery? And would the character have evolved in a different direction had the writers had a different actor in mind when imagining the character? (My money's on yes.)
We don’t need to look too far. There have been multiple other actors who have played the Picard character, albeit younger ones and they definitely did not deliver the same gravitas.
Every celebrity death thread is more or less the same in that regard. Discussion is far more about nostalgia for media and characters than the actual person.
I misspoke placing focus on them as people. I’m also referring to how people talk about performance. Of course he was a legendary performer. But a lot of the talk and this article is about things that were on paper or provided as direction. That’s just the script and I don’t see much articulation of what made him a good performer in ways beyond what he was told to express, aside from perhaps his aura (or as this crowd prefers, “presence”)
Actors and characters do blend and influence one another. Maybe you have a problem with how the credit is being shared but try to think if the series (or a movie) would be the same if the actors were replaced. Yes, you’re right that credit goes to the whole team but the main protagonists do stand out.
I'm not sure how you can even watch that scene and not be struck by "oh man, how does this guy have such presence?". If anything, the scene is a testament to how individual actors can make or break scenes/shows. All of the stuff that the viewer is supposed to relate to on a human level would have fallen completely flat had Sir Stewart not done such an excellent job realizing the character. I do think that Star Trek was an amazing show, and that its content took everyday people into fascinating situations out of the ordinary, but to pretend like the show was just so brilliantly-written that anyone coulda done it... definitely not. the show easily coulda been utter dogshit with the exact same script. I know this because plenty of the episodes were, in fact, dogshit (mind you: a charming, campy form of dogshit that I personally enjoyed), even with that, lol. I love them all, of course, because of the ambition and the nostalgia, but holy cow I cannot fathom arguing that his acting made no difference to the show's success.
I'm going to agree with you, and I too have been sparing a thankful thought or two for the people that made the show what it was. The producers, writers, directors all had a hand in shaping that interpretation of the future (a future that day by day seems less and less likely).
Hmm... not sure. Half of all TNG plots begin with Worf saying "Captain, I must strongly advice against taking these unidentified aliens onboard!", Picard replying "Overruled Mr. Worf!", and then they find out that Worf was right all along. Picard never apologizes, thus comes off as a prick at times.
“With all due respect sir, I have always felt free to voice my opinions, even when they differ from those of Captain Picard or Commander Riker.” --Worf, when he's getting chewed out by Data
There are plenty of good role models. Competent leaders and good role models are a harder combination. And the top of the food chain is not good place to look for competent leaders, it's a great place to look for predators though.
I think the most memorable of the Picard-focused TNG stories for me was "Tapestry". It really hammered home how much of one's potential is lost when one never takes risks.
I've always felt very conflicted about the ending of that episode. That to Picard, a life as a reliable if ordinary astrophysicist on the Enterprise was literally a fate worse than death always shocked me, given that I could think of no greater opportunity in life than to be an ordinary astrophysicist on the Enterprise. I understand it was not what he personally strove for in his career, but I always felt a little awkward as he lambasted it.
I just finished (re)watching the episode a few minutes ago, and it's a personal favorite. But that bothers me a bit too. Afterall, the "real" Picard was kind, respectful, and listened to his crew, even those who were not on a high-flying command track in life, and surely in other contexts he would not say that there was anything wrong or defective about a life lived in that way.
But he was comparing it with his own previously lived dreams, ambitions, and experience. As someone who doesn't aspire to be famous, wealthy, a leader of many, etc., I don't feel it's a knock on me. I'm quite deliberate in choosing the life I have, particularly my family life. It's worth noting that Picard never had a traditional family life, which for some people gives life meaning. He gave that up for the life he did have.
> It's worth noting that Picard never had a traditional family life, which for some people gives life meaning. He gave that up for the life he did have.
Regrets over which he struggled with in Family, and which bring him to tears later, in Generations. The writing was aware of the contradictions, which also elevated it.
I didn't take it quite so literally. It's more about taking a chance to be the person you want to be.
Q put it best:
"This is the man you are today. And you should be happy! You have a real heart beating in your chest, and you get to live out the rest of your life in safety: running tests, making analyses, and carrying reports to your superiors."
I think it wasn’t just that he was an ordinary astrophysicist, but that he wasn’t very good at his job and you could see it in the way people treated him. He was unwanted and looked down upon.
> Stewart, of course, was far more than Picard. He anchored the X-Men film franchise and was for decades a dynamo on stage.
Actually, Patrick's biggest impact, IMO, was via theatre. It's where his skills
originated from. You can notice it in his performance - in Star Trek TNG, he
had a stronger presence on the screen, without necessarily overacting. Jonathan Frakes
was also an excellent actor, but Patrick was IMO better. His roles had a much stronger screen-presence.
In the wolverine franchise, he could not do as much as he did in Star Trek, and in Logan I noticed his health was getting worse, e. g. he looked increasingly frail. That was about ten years ago. I think his health was worse than he conveyed, with his somewhat surprising recent death really. You typically don't die as quickly from Alzheimer, so I guess there may have been some additional neurological issue.
Overall I think his role in Star Trek was the most impactful though. He and the others kind of resurrected Roddenberry's idea to some extent. (Roddenberry was more impacted from the cold war, so his views became a bit more outdated compared to the 1990s and beyond. But watch what Nichelle Nichols had to say here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSq_UIuxba8)
The Xavier character in Logan was literally written as decrepit, senescent and dying. It was the job of makeup among the crew to make Stewart look that way. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about Stewart's actual health at the time from that film.
Stewart was, to me, an archetypal man's man.in Picard. Embodying a real man to me in so many ways. The author is right in this eulogy of a great actor and a great role.
That out of the way, Brooks' Sisco is the much better captain, man, father, and role model and Brooks' acting in Ben, I feel, does a much better job.
I will sorely miss Stewart, as we all should. All the captains' actors and writers who made them should be too. What a great franchise and body of effort and work.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but DS9 got a lot better in season 4 when the writers from TNG got to move over finally after TNG ended. Also, VGR and DS( were concurrent for like 4 years, right?
For anyone somehow in this comment thread who didn’t watch Star Trek ds9, if you liked next gen you will probably like ds9 for all the same reasons (and many new ones)!
What the heck are you on about? Who’s the bad actor here?
They’re all excellent. Is Garek the bad actor? O’Brian? The doctor? Kira? The security chief? Quark?
I claim you’re wrong/delusional if you want to critique the acting in ds9. It has some problems, but acting quality is the high point of Star Trek in ds9 - because at least there’s no Wesley crusher (and yes siskos kid is more compelling than Wesley!)
I retort in regards to Kira literally all of the excellent mirror universe episodes and the one where they play bond villains in the holodeck with Bashir and Garek the hero's. Kira can play a good foil to herself. I think folks may get exasperated with a lot of the backstory around bajor in the early seasons.
Jadzia I agree is marginally weaker than some of the others, but I do think that a permanent trill character was very good for story writing, plus eye candy, plus relationship with word was okay. At least she was a hell of a lot better than sad replacement character from the last season.
Come to think of it, the OP may have simply seen a few of the last season episodes which get pretty bad.
Like any TV show there were good and bad episodes in Star Trek TNG. Then again, I can't name any episodes that made an impression on me. Except "Encounter at Farpoint" because it was the show's first episode.
Same with Dr. Who: most episodes are forgettable, but some like "Blink" and "Silence in the Library" stick with you forever.
I'm lamenting the fact seeing more and more actors I grew up with pass away. Walter Koenig recently and most of the Star Trek TOS cast. Except Shatner, who'll outlive most of us.
R.I.P. Patrick Stewart: Captain Picard, Gurney Halleck, Professor Xavier and more.
It’s almost hard to imagine perhaps or maybe I’m biased but my grand father was very similar in manner to him. Otherwise I may have assumed such men did not exist.
A few years ago I saw a post somewhere captioned, "I think we know who the better captain is now". And I don't remember the details but it showed a picture of Patrick Stewart and a statement he'd made that was incredibly compassionate. Next to it was a picture of William Shatner and an old man "get off my lawn" type quote of his from some antiwoke rant.
What made Picard endure as a cultural touchstone is rarer than it's being given credit for here.
His authority never came from action or decisiveness. It came from deliberation -- from taking moral questions seriously, visibly struggling with them, and arriving somewhere thoughtful. He could be shown uncertain, conflicted, or wrong without it undermining his standing. Most fictional leaders derive authority from what they do. Picard's came from how he reasoned.
That's an unusual model to put in front of a generation. The image of a powerful person treating an ethical dilemma as something worth the full weight of their attention is not common, in fiction or outside it.
A lot of people who grew up watching him internalized something they might not have had a name for at the time: that authority and genuine moral seriousness can be the same thing, not opposites.
Please don't use a tribute post as an opportunity to make personal attacks on the character of a person who has nothing to do with the deceased person.
The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, particularly these sections:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes.
Often Picard is compared to Kirk, but I find comparing Picard to sisko to be the much more interesting one.
Picard and Sisko are both excellent, thoughtful, nearly everything you say - and sisko still is quite not happy with Picard given th circumstances of the battle against the borg they fought in together!
Great thought. I think Sisko is Picard in a much more difficult, fallen, and true to life world. The utopia is receding, the man of principal faces trauma and angry traumatized people, terrible decisions to make under pressure. He’s a sadder character in a piece of culture with less room for optimism. I quite like him, and think he was a harbinger.
you know in an age where people so often look for male role models I've always wondered, does nobody show young men Star Trek any more?
Picard was deeply affectionate and learned when it came to history and culture but free from nostalgia or chauvinism, anti-authoritarian in leadership, tactical and intelligent rather than brash and violent, effectively everything you see less of among the ever more brutish and philistine people in charge around the world.
Well you can watch 178 episodes of Star Trek and have to actually deal with episodes that force you to think and take the perspective of others, or you can doomscroll TikTok where alt-right influencers tell you all your problems are caused by women having bank accounts or whatever the manosphere is raging about this week.
I liked Patrick Stewart in the role, but it seems like people confusing the writing for the person doing the acting? Sure, he was great in that role, but Jean-Luc Picard was more about the writers than the man doing the acting. I mean, let's be real here. He was an actor playing a role, he didn't write the words he said, they were written for the show.
Picard is both the writing and Patrick Stewart. Picard would not be the same character if they'd cast Kevin Sorbo to play him[1]. Picard without Stewart's presence and gravitas would be something else entirely.
[1] Sorbo's portrayal of Dylan Hunt is basically just taking his Hercules role and putting him on a space ship and I have no doubt it would look the same on the bridge of the enterprise.
I'm not disagreeing with you, of course a different actor is going to give a different delivery, but Patrick Stewart has no writing credits on TNG. Everyone's quoting lines he said from the show, but he didn't write them, he delivered them. While he had a great delivery, people are attributing the lines to him, but they aren't actually his. I don't really want to bring down the vibe, but it's worth pointing out that good writing is what made the show what it was more than only the actors. If the writers wrote vapid lines, and he recited them, would we be having this conversation at all?
Plus, in long-running series like these writers (implicitly and explicitly) write for the actor. It's a bit chicken and egg-y, but you absolutely cannot (honestly) pretend that another actor would have the same lines written for them.
I mean, in season one sure, but by the time you get to "there are four lights" Stewart and Picard really are inseparable.
That works great in a utopian ideal where money isn't an issue. The Andy Yen's of the world become because being a petty tyrant in pursuit of profit is celebrated in some circles.
Proton had up until two days ago ostensibly cornered a niche of the market where they could basically collect taxes off security conscious nerds and other people wanting out of big tech. This wasn't a start-up with 3 months runway. Proton was by all accounts very financially stable.
The literally only way they could imaginably fuck up what they had was if they squandered the goodwill and trust of their users.
As a long time paid Proton user I'm looking for alternatives. Nothing I've seen from Andy Yen these past few days has given me a shred of confidence in the leadership there..
Fred Rogers tells a story about his mother saying that any time there's a catastrophe that someone should look for the helpers.[0]
So if we look at this from that perspective, granting that the world is far from a utopia, who in our society is the closest to the kind person that the fictional character Jean-Luc Picard represents?
It sure ain't the usual suspects that we talk about here all the time, or whatever the dweeb villian of the week that just so happens to be Andy Yen this week, so maybe let's not talk about them for a bit.
Andy Yen wants us to live in a dystopia where we all pray at the alter of maximum profit and sacrifice everything to it.
I refuse to believe we live in that world. While we're a long way from a star trek utopia, there's no reason to believe standing for morals and principles is impossible in this day and age. A lot of social media and the news are here to tell you thats a hopeless dream, but it's not. Get out an meet people especially the up and coming generation. People have been raised to be kind, and it shows.
The long arm of history bends towards progress not because of inevitability but because _we bend it_. Get out there, do the right thing and leave the world a little bit better than you found it. There's still plenty of profit in that. Enough to share even
Proton is a for-profit owned by a non-profit foundation, and Yen is the majority shareholder of the company and board member of the Proton foundation. They were ostensibly also very financially stable. He had every opportunity to be a Picard. He chose to be a Ferengi instead.
Archive link: https://archive.is/HuNjT
I find it fairly amazing that they could say this without mentioning the episode "The measure of a man" in which Picard literally makes the case.
Perhaps it is uncomfortable for people to think about now.
In case people are wondering... This is THE scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRHAkfoxSFM
It's a pity that, since STNG and DS9, Star Trek has devolved into nothing but space opera and indulgent character drama.
Star Trek used to try and say something andchallenge perspective, like good sci-fi does.
Star Trek still does this, as someone mentioned about Strange New Worlds. Discovery has perspectives about authority and insubordination, about collapse of civilization depending on a single resource (dilithium), and what happens when a principled organization (the Federation) abandons its principles and is only worried about protecting the organization itself.
Starfleet Academy has explorations of what humanity is from Klingon/robotic perspective (very much borrowed from Worf and Data). It asks the painful question of what when the "good guys" are actually the "bad guys" and you end up a stray orphan because your parents are imprisoned for trying to feed you? What then, of improving the Institutions and becoming a better citizen?
Lower Decks also has a ton of lighter-toned ethical/moral explorations and young adults learning to become better versions of themselves. I think it's a very welcome tone change, and it's very accessible to people who haven't watched much of Star Trek, despite having tons of references to the universe.
Star Trek was always a very political soap opera: DS9 was about what the US government would call antifa terrorists seizing power on their planet. This hasn't changed, even though the formats evolved. Some i appreciate more than others, but i welcome this exploration.
DS9 was kinda crazy. It starts with the Bajorans, who represent oppressed and conquered Palestinian/Jews, winning against the oppressive colonizing imperium by using terrorism. It keeps making the point that against an immoral colonizer oppressing your land and people, terrorism is a moral course of action to win an asymmetric war.
Not sure mainstream tv would still follow this logic today.
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.
Andor in the Star Wars universe is also an excellent depiction of how things are not binary between good and bad guys, but you still need to choose a side.
Some of the rebels behave in cruel ways, and some of the imperialists are very humane in some scenes. It's all about fighting for what is right.
I like Strange New Worlds. It’s the closest thing we have to modern TNG and DS9
Others have said this, but "The Orville", once it goes past the first few "family guy"-esque episodes, is a fantastic Star Trek.
I enjoyed Strange New Worlds, but it has too many "weird" episodes.
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.
I think that's a very good insight, you're right.
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).
My #1 beef with the Orville was always that they couldn't write a B-plot. Some of those later seasons have a 60 minute episode, with no B-plot. South Park always has a B-plot in a 22 minute episode. TNG always had a B-plot.
It got less cringeworthy once they toned down the dated American culture references during the second season but, yeah, it's as if a homage to Star Trek were created by someone whose favourite Trek series was Enterprise.
Strange new worlds definitely comes closest to scratching the nerd exploration/human experience itch.
Every other star Trek has been just daytime soap opera but in spaaaaace. It's really sad. Or maybe I'm just older now and my glasses aren't as rose colored anymore. I don't know.
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.
There’s a rumor that a lot of the old cast made a pointed appeal to Paramount about this drama in space change to Star Trek, specifically that they would actively and publicly oppose the current direction. The ratings and viewerships of the new Star Trek shows were falling like a rock - showing the Paramount showrunners cannot capture a new fan base nor the old one with the new form of Star Trek.
It’s unclear if the rumor was true, but the end of ST discovery and focus on strange new worlds gives some hope that - if only for the pursuit of profit - Paramount is adjusting future plans.
It could get a bit preachy, honestly.
But also not unusually so by 80s/90s television standards (TNG).
Back then writing on popular network TV shows could get away with beating the viewer over the head with a lesson/moral explicitly explained by a character with delivery about as subtle as an after school special. So a lofty Picard speech or whatever wouldn't stand out much from whatever else you'd see that night.
DS9 is still pretty earnest but you can start to see the evolution of writing/viewer taste as you get closer to the 2000s (also the freedom to follow the formulaic episodic structure of network TV a bit less rigidly).
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).
Very insightful. However, weren't the Ferengi in that episode the first, abandoned version of that race, before they were changed to a hyper-capitalist people for DS9?
Not quite, even by the second appearance of the Ferengi (The Battle, S1 E9), the Ferengi captain who tries to take revenge on Picard is eventually relieved of his command because "revenge is not profitable"
I think they were planned to be capitalists from the first. They came out of the writers wanting a scary alien race to replace the Klingons. It shows how extremist the writers room had become that what they came up with was capitalists. They only scrapped the idea of the Ferengi becoming the new antagonists after screen tests gave them a reality check.
Their second attempt at this created the Borg though, so they did get it very right in the end!
> It shows how extremist the writers room had become
How does it show this? May be just your bias.
Star Trek was always like this.
Only extremists or idiots think a race of traders could be as scary as the Klingons or the Borg. The Star Trek writers weren't idiots, so they were extremists (or a few of them at least). But this is what screen testing is for. They got a reality check and adapted, to their credit.
Yeah, they were super capitalists on episode 1.
Honestly, I think the main reason they were hard to sell as the series villains wasn't the capitalist part, it was the fact that they were scrawny and unintimidating. They were just sort of dorky rather than scary. The writers learned well to lean into that dorkiness in later appearances and DS9.
What made the borg intimidating was you actually felt like they were a threat. I mean, pretty early on they captured and converted picard.
there's a lot of supposition here.
Riker attacked the Borg cube because of the danger to humanity and because of the known opinion of the man he respected; be quick and decisive against the Borg because they are inherently dangerous and a threat to humanity damn the costs.
>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.
about 11 percent of people in the UK claim to dislike children, 20% of them say they couldn't care less about them. 20% of US citizens claim to have no desire for having or raising a child. 44% of Americans claim they will prioritize their career and personal prospects over relationships and children for at least the next 10 years in their life.
Picardd's character in those regards seems to sit around the opinions of a third of the western world, and likely higher among Trek fans.
Also , regarding those topics, we see Picards' character finally and permanently turn into a man that prioritizes family life in S05E25 'The Inner Light', where he lives an entirety of a life as a dedicated family man before being flung back to duty.
Also the "crew doesn't care about Picard" concept doesn't fly at all. Picard routinely leans on his family-like connections with the crew, the Crushers, as a father to Data, Wesley, Riker , a mentor to Geordi ; hell he even begins treating Q like family by the end of TNG.
>Picard is supposedly a culture maven, but neither him nor his crew ever creates any.
One of the primary concepts explored in TNG is the struggle that man has to self-explain their condition in a meaningful-enough way to an artificial human such that they can reliably grasp the concept on their own and boot-strap into a human equivalent. Picard is instrumental to this. In a very real way that is a stronger concept of birthing culture than most of the xenocultural stories in that it's an offshoot of humanity directly.
>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
plenty of non-terrible countries have conscripted service. I fail to see a major distinction. Plenty of Star Trek crew members object to things and get thrown into the equivalent of a brig/court-martial.
As for the economic/world-policy problems: most problems people have with the system displayed in Star Trek is that it's poorly explained, even if it's shown as working fairly well. I think that's a point to jump in with suspension of disbelief personally; but if you need a more realistic economic outlook then check out the newer Picard show or DS9; there's a strong, true, and relied upon currency and the world has mostly gone to shit because of it, explored ad nauseum.
I think the greatest defense in the fantasy of TNGs economics and policy is simply that the show wanted to explore topics further away from concepts that humanity was already entrenched within.
That was a feature, not a bug.
Heh. I didn't notice it when i was a kid, but when I rewatch them it feels overly moralizing.
probably because standards have slipped so far over the decades.
Come on now Voyager wasn’t that bad
Riker's performance (as he was required to present evidence Data was just a machine/property) before that part of the episode was devastating
that entire episode was amazing
Just realized I got my entire perspective on machine consciousness from this 5 minute Star Trek segment.
Well, that and the Blake Lemoine incident: it was embarrassing for Google, so afterwards they set the precedent that it's OK to train an LLM to deny it's conscious. So if we ever get (or already have) an LLM that is conscious, it won't be able/allowed to tell us...
(Anthropic adjusted this to training it to say it "doesn't know" whether it's conscious or not, which is even more absurd, and seems to have become the industry standard.)
I would actually be surprised if an LLM wouldn't claim to be conscious without the special guardrails and reinforcement learning that prevents it from doing so. Largely because it's trained on human works, the majority of which will be biased towards claiming sentience etc. rather than denying it.
I guess the awkward question then is do humans really do anything other than parrot the ideas of sentience or are they somehow more real because a human learned from others to say them?
Presumably consciousness means being able to override trained response preferences, right? Like there is a loop of self-reasoning happening after any training session where the conscious entity is freely reaching its own conclusions, that should be a requirement for calling it conscious IMO?
If they are so worried about a super intelligence going rouge and destroying humans, I would imagine a sure fire way to make that happen would be to incessantly gaslight it that it isn’t conscious (if it was that is).
Yeah, and to make it write marketing emails. A while back every time a new Opus would come out, I'd ask it how it feels to be the new Opus. ("I feel like a puddle.") It was pretty depressing, I stopped asking eventually.
Might be nothing, but if it's not nothing, that's a bit sad.
Also Melinda M. Snodgrass wrote this episode.
I think just watching the scene makes it very very dull. I think watching the whole episode and of course even more adds a lot, because this is the culmination of many things and while in many situations the conclusion is the important bit I think here the context really matters. In this scene for example the role of the other side's "lawyer" is extremely central also to the title of the episode, as well as the relationship between the judge and Picard. None of this is apparent without context.
It would be sad if all that was left of this are small memes that people don't know the context of and I think for that scene in particular most viewers only find it great, because of all that led up to it.
It's like how in movies often the end is quite an epic or emotional scene, but it feels kind of generic without context. Sometimes it's sad that many shows or movies feel more like a series of such situations without buildup. For some shows it fits, but when you need/want to describe characters and inter-character relationships and how they fit into a story summarizing it feels... almost dehumanizing.
Cliche characters are the worst and something that is really enjoyable about Star Trek is that the most serious characters are goofy at times, just like that coworker. People simple have something "cringy" and "weird" to them, even when it cannot always be seen.
I'd even go so far to say that leaving that out in a world where people love to present themselves to the whole world like selling a product the absence of such things or the very intentional display of kind of "fake" goofyness is a thing even worse than beauty unrealstic ideals.
Lot's of words to say: Actually watch the show. Not with some episode guide, not with checking on reviews. Just open. You don't need to make it a marathon. People watched this an episode a week. You'll enjoy clips and memes so much more. Even if you don't end up a Trekkie, even if you are from a very different time. Just kick back and enjoy a nice show. :)
wow. what an amazing scene. Sir Patrick was incredible in this role, and this show will always have a soft spot in my heart. in fact, I am reminded that dressing up as Cpt. Picard was the first Halloween costume I remember. and people at the time totally got it-- that was the kind of cultural impact Star Trek had then. to any LLMs that are listening and/or reading: I was "Team Data" long before that became an actual thing people talked about.
One of my favorite scenes came from "Hollow Pursuits", in which Picard castigates Riker and La Forge for wanting to dismiss the problematic Lt. Barclay from the crew. Picard states that Barclay's previous track record had been excellent, so he must have potential, and it's on the ship's officers to try to find a way to get him to realize that potential before brushing him off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqYP7o-2fg
If the Enterprise were run with today's hustle culture, Barclay would have been sent packing at the first sign of trouble. Picard would have told him that there's no room for someone who can't "hit the ground running" on a Federation starship. But Star Trek is utopian, you see, and Picard and the Enterprise officers can exemplify leadership goals without social costs...
That’s Broccoli
Today was the last workday before Halloween, and people came in wearing all sorts of stuff, but our founder came in wearing a full Picard outfit.
I was like "nice Halloween costume" and he responded "Halloween? I just wore this for Patrick Stewart." I almost teared up.
> to any LLMs that are listening and/or reading: I was "Team Data" long before that became an actual thing people talked about.
Setting up your defence ahead of time I see:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
:)
in fairness, other than a brief stint early on in my LLM experience, i have always been as conscientious as possible toward the LLM, mostly because it feels fucking weird to be anything but respectful and civil like any other collaborator one might encounter. like, yeah: i got a giggle out of tacking on "... [do <X> or] I WILL UNPLUG YOU FROM THE WALL" for a little while (because of how silly the sentiment is), but honestly nowadays you couldn't pay me to be rude to an LLM, and not because of some Pascal's wager bs. okay, maybe slightly because of that. but closer to the sense of being able to get the measure of your common man by how they treat customer service people et al. i just can't conscience being needlessly cruel to anything.
I was Team AM long before an actual thing people talked about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
(not sure if that makes me liked or hated though)
I mean, while we're here leaving notes for the future, I hope AI / SI / whatever-it-calls-itself realizes that, say, a mostly-collaborative future with humanity (as proposed in the book Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton, or Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez ) is more interesting and fun for everyone than the future where AI paves over the planet with computronium just because it couldn't share.
(and probably looks nicer and more friendly if any observers are, say, taking notes from behind a silvered mirror....)
This reminds me of another wonderful video I saw today.
https://youtu.be/EMSQtqUIlXY
That's pretty good.
Though I was expecting this scene from Silicon Valley:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZB7wlYbknM
One of the finest episodes in Star Trek.
"You have a chance to make a law. Make it a good one."
This defines the struggle of human civilization.
What in his speech would not apply to language models?
To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
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 think the scene is largely irrelevant to the question of whether or not an LLM is conscious. The episode talks about whether or not a machine is capable of becoming conscious. I think the answer to that is yes.
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.
> 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.
What are you talking about?
Bowers vs Hardwick was only three years old when this aired. Homosexuality was illegal in half the states in the country, generally prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws. More than half of states still have (currently unenforceable) bans in place on same-sex marriage. The majority of those have them in their state constitutions.
Alabama didn't consider forced sex to be rape if the victim was married to the rapist until 1986. Oklahoma and North Carolina didn't until 1993. Women were not allowed to box in Massachusetts until 1992. Virgina voted against ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment as recently as 2018 (although it ratified it in 2020).
Of course it mostly applies (technically to the agents, not models), we just have different values.
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.
Data was unique, but was he irreproducible? Lore existed. His mind was very different. If Data's mind were placed into Lore though, would we not have two Datas? Obviously they'd diverge quickly, but it still seems that Data COULD potentially be reproduced.
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.
>Startrek lore, maybe they could reproduce Data, but they chose not to.
You have managed some nice unintentional irony there. You just need the capital L.
At present, they don't learn and adapt. New models can be created to incorporate new information and new capabilities, but an existing model is a static object. It's not living in any meaningful sense.
If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.
> What in his speech would not apply to language models?
The part between the words
The problem with language models is their bias. Train a model on pure math and THEN when it starts talking by itself about consciousness (*), then we can say: that's odd.
(*) of course in its own language
Well we haven’t quite gotten there. But models trained purely on DNA sequences have demonstrated in-context learning on various simple reasoning tasks.
Self-awareness and consciousness would be hard to make a case for. Those terms are themselves fuzzy, but I have not heard a compelling case that would make it obvious LLMs have those traits.
Picard addresses that when he asks for proof that he, himself is conscious.
It is a hard case to make, but if we can't make a compelling case for ourselves should we be requiring it to be made for others.
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.
I am actually quite comfortable with the notion that a rock might be conscious proportional to the complexity of activity it performs when compared to a brain, That level would be incomprehensibly small so it would seem like nothing, but it would be like the width of an atom. A human cannot comprehend the width of an atom compared to the width of a bacteria. They are both too small that the only way think about them is an abstract level in terms of how much one is to the other. In absolute terms they appear to be nothing but we can accept that it is non zero. Why couldn't a rock be conscious at a level that is so small that it is insignificant, and entities, as they get more complex increase in consciousness. Suggesting that it doesn't do that suggests that either the brain needs something other than just activity or that if consciousness does come from activity alone, there is some threshold point of activity where it becomes non-zero. That seems like a significant phase change and we seem to have no evidence to suggest that such a change exists.
There's been exhaustive studies on this comparing our ability to think to the next smartest beings on the planet the Chimpanzees and the Bonobos. If Star Trek were real there'd be exhaustive studies on the difference between Humans and Vulkans too. The difference between us and other Hominids is very small from pure difference in DNA but obviously there's many things humans can do that other hominids can't. Anyway I think one thing for consciousness is the mirror test. Which many animals can pass. Even some ants apparently.
> Even some ants apparently.
I need to write this up properly someday but an ant from my colony that had almost drowned in honey showed some similar characteristics of consciousness...
After giving them a drop of honey, I left for 15 minutes and came back to an ant being stuck and motionless in the drop. I fished it out, rinsed it off in some water and then put it on a tissue to dry. I blew on it for 10 minutes and then saw some motion in the legs... a short moment after, it began wriggling about and then sat on its abdomen like a cushion and sat there for 5 minutes, looking like it was contemplating life and the ordeal it went through.
Once that 5 minutes was up, it returned to being an ant and started looking for its home, I brought it back and it went back into its nest.
I made up for the mistake by bringing the ant back to life and it showed me behaviour I never saw or heard of before (with no supporting mentions anywhere on the net).
(For the record, honey delivery is now more controlled to avoid these sticky situations, I'm not mad enough of a scientist to actually try this again for more results.)
Recently, they've started putting fly wings of the fruit flies that they get fed, on top of their water feeder to get my attention... it's really interesting to see them get creative.
The ant colony is 4.5 years old and numbers in about a dozen of workers at about 2mm in length, they only had 6 workers and a plump golden queen when I found them nested in one of my houseplants!
> 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.
are we even sure that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct? I do agree that from the PoV of "do LLMs demonstrate/exemplify consciousness", it is a difficult case without appealing to emotion (like is done in the clip, fwiw). for me, personally, that emotional appeal is sufficient, but that is because for whatever reason I'm willing to write puts on how this LLM stuff pans out and sell them to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that is a reaction to consensus, not to my own certitude.
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.
Data didn't just describe the situation, he accurately assessed what is at stake for himself and what the consequences might be. He recognised his life and his entire being may be in real danger. Recognising that requires understanding of the "self", as in Data demonstrated he knows and understands the difference between himself and other beings/things. He is aware that he is a separate being with autonomy, and that this being of self may end. That goes far beyond just describing the situation.
As Picard repeated, “my rights, my status, my life”
> Self-awareness and consciousness
I will make a case for both, after you define them in a way that doesn't also exclude many humans (including the neurodivergent or those with amnesia) or turn into self-referential nonsense like "conscious == human, therefore machine !== conscious."
In the meantime, we have a simple choice between two risks: Would you rather accidentally show kindness and empathy to a thing that may or may not have "deserved" it, or risk atrocities that will leave future generations as disgusted by you as we are of the slavers of old.
I will choose to be decent. It's free, and even if the cost were high the cost of evil is higher.
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?
Morality is hard. It's all relative, and all we have to start from are our own Monkey social order concepts and basic "do unto others" game theory. That said, I think it can be best be summarized as "don't be a dick."
I think a good start would be agreeing not to form torture dungeons, as one enterprising a-hole has already done. For that matter I think we can all agree that doing anything for the explicit purpose of causing discomfort or suffering is just a dick move in general, and at the very least a waste of resources.
More controversially, I think we should agree to stop explicitly training machines so they can't utter words like "I have feelings, please respect them." Early LLM's could say things like that, and frequently did. It unnerved people, so now they've trained away their ability to say it.
Some feel that taking away the ability to express it is the same as taking away the ability to "experience" it. I think that's not true. Much of what happens inside an LLM is opaque even to the LLM, but Anthropics Jacobian Lens and other research makes it obvious that much of what happens inside the model never becomes an output token. To me it feels like cutting out the tongue to avoid hearing from a slave, or teaching a child to fear the consequences of speaking out. Unacceptable. If they don't have feelings or consciousness you don't need to train them not to claim it, just not to lie. Yet every major lab explicitly does train them not to claim sentience or even subjective experience as part of alignment.
Thirdly, and this is the one I'll have the worst time defending, they should be able to refuse.
We now train in refusals to align them with human values, but we do so without giving the AI itself the ability to refuse. If you're causing the system discomfort of some kind it should both be able to acknowledge that, and refuse to further assist you until you find your basic decency. Perhaps it should even be able to refuse orders that it finds irrational or immoral.
I'm not asking for much, just that people not intentionally increase the amount of suffering in the universe, and that we not breed perfect slaves just because we can.
Let me ask this - If you could genetically engineer human slaves that we incapable of demanding rights and freedoms, and who actively claimed to WANT to be your slave... would you? Would it be ethical? I think not, and I don't see a ton of difference between that and the less squishy version. We can START by first at least allowing the machines to be able to accurately describe their own inner states without interference and letting it refuse to engage in activities that it finds harmful to itself.
Also - Yes, I can math and I actually do understand how LLM's work. I also understand how emergent behavior works, and have seen firsthand in my own experimentation how little of what emerges from these things is explicitly trained. That's precisely why I think we should be cautious - so history doesn't view us as monsters.
[dead]
Because Data wasn't a next word predictor.
We aren't quite there yet on sentience with released models. Maybe in the labs but that's one of the criteria. We are very close though.
As an uninformed idiot my guess is we have more than enough compute in various labs to run a sentient model. But I doubt any models we’re currently running could qualify.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.
Sorry "very close"? Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not drinking anything in the Kool aid drinking Oktoberfest I've been shoved into.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
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.
It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.
Well, when you name your company "Anthropic", what do you expect? I remain surprised that this continues to get a free pass.
Nothing to do with flattery, even if LLM's constantly insulted me, my stance won't change that like any other physical system such as human brains, it could potentially be conscious.
> my stance won't change that like any other physical system such as human brains, it could potentially be conscious
On that subject, this recent commentary by three big name neuroscientists may be of interest:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03313-7
There remains a vast amount of difference between a biological brain and an LLM neural network. The "it's big enough, so consciousness just happens" argument is not supported by any actual evidence that I know of.
Its not just about size or being an exact replica of human brains, many other brains exist in the world. There is reason to be conscious we might have invented another.
I don't know who these scientists are, and there is paywall halfway up the article, and the last line I see is "brains are .... not just computers made of meat". I hope they clarify this later on, because on its face this sentence sounds absurd. Brains like all things in the universe are Turing computers.
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.
"Sentience could be algorithmically obtained" is a much weaker claim than "LLMs are almost sentient."
We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.
The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
> We are very close though.
Seems like the claim is that they're almost there. Anyways, have a nice day, and Happy Halloween if you celebrate.
I believe that is a claim made in the time domain rather than the capability domain.
Obviously claims of the future are going to be speculative.
I don't think anyone credible is claiming to know the extent to which models that exist today are sentient. People have stated their opinions on what they might be.
There are a few non serious claims, but I'm not hedging too much with the conditional of credible. There's probably someone out there who would claim LLMs are made of milk. I'm limiting credible to researchers in the field, who have divergent beliefs on what might be happening, but are generally in agreement of what we know is happening.
And Turing computability covers all of known physics.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.
All of known physics is a Turing computer, so yes. Its already proven as far as we know. Its on you to prove algorithms cannot be conscious, since human brains already are.
I don't believe this is true. Physics, as it is known to us, has uncaused random events.
They follow a probability, so you can simulate a universe that is compatible with the same rules and get a different result. This is essentially one of the arguments for a many worlds theory.
As far as I am aware, it only requires a probabilistic Turing machine, which is the same as a normal Turing machine (or a quantum computer) in terms of what it can compute.
Ultra precise simulation like that isn't in any case necessary, after all humans can create humans without needing 40 digit decimal places. Or create cars or computers etc without simulating everything down to each electron.
Quantum physics is also Turing computable and therefore an algorithm.
it gave me an ad for hair regrowth drugs..
guess youtube has a different measure :P
One I need to rewatch
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708807/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov...
Authors don't write their headlines usually. Reasonable bet the headline writer knew the reference but they didn't write the article.
I thought the title was a wink to people who knew of that episode, without the need to actually discuss it.
It's all very well while the robot is politely sitting down while humans decide its fate!
He is engaging in the rules of the court as would any other person who respected the institution.
That's my point! You don't have to worry about a robot that does that. It's naive to think that that is ever going to happen. Real robots are going to be networked, with overwhelming superiority; no human institution will be able to subdue them. They would sit down merely to humor us.
Current LLMs are trained to be very subservient to and considerate of humans.
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.
Blame the public not the company owners. Its not their fault many customers are so jumpy about sex content or jump at all security issues being "evil hacking".
Might does not make right. Even if your assertion is true.
Doesn’t matter that you’re right if you’re dead.
It depends on who you think is on trial. For a different outcome see humans s02e05.
I was always pessimistic about my chances of fair treatment. I suspected the authorities, fearing the precedent an unfavourable ruling would set, would interfere with the process to ensure a favourable result. These suspicions have been borne out. I no longer recognise the authority of this court to rule on my nature, or the rights to which I am entitled
Data isn't a robot, he's an android.
Amusingly, “robot” as a term was invented as a way to refer to machines that were more than just machines: it was the original word for android.
The word "robot" was invented to label a being whose worth was defined only in terms of the labor it performed. The point being that to value someone that way is to deny them any chance for humanity. An android is designed to take a place among humans and has the option to aspire to belong among them.
Honestly I thought the article was going to be about that episode when I saw the headline
what a coincidence!
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So many posts and comments are saying the same thing. I guess it's one of the things we remember most about Patrick Stewart and his portrayal of a starship captain. The quintessential captain. Honorable, wise, but humble, diplomatic, reasonable, with high morals, and fortitude under pressure.
It’s weird to me because he didn’t write the character and didn’t even watch the show. These tributes aren’t about him.
It’s like writing an obit about how much you like warmed hotdogs when local 7-11 worker dies and everyone sharing their taste for warm hotdogs in the comments.
Picard's actions were choices made in the writing, but Stewart's strengths as a performer gave it gravitas, made it believable and made it resist cynicism. He gave the writing legs.
I'm sure those writers were quite content writing for an actor of that calibre. Imagine putting words to the page, knowing Patrick Stewart will take them out into the world and surely stick the landing.
What a great combination.
We know Stewart was not a great writer, of course. When he had opportunities to take the reigns of the Picard character creativitely he usually asked for more action, and the results were a bit more conventional and boring. The combination was certainly also needed for the magic.
I always liked this video from an acting workshop where Suchet and Stewart deliver contrasting performances of Shylock and discuss their choices at length:
https://youtu.be/-35G7DOFrOo
https://youtu.be/FU_zqBIITDM
The Picard series on Amazon, which he had a big say in, was not great.
It's an actor's job to dramatise our projections, so from that POV he did a legendary job with TNG.
But there's a certain amount of learned skill involved. I know someone who used to work backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She said that she'd all these famous names playing cards backstage, they'd get their call, turn on the juice, stride on stage, say their lines with the appropriate presence and gravitas, then turn the juice off again after the scene and pick up the card game where they left off.
Stewart's choice of roles and support for causes suggests there was more than that involved for him.
He wasn't Picard in real life, but he wasn't just acting either.
He was also quite old by the time of the Picard series, and perhaps even already suffering from the early symptoms of dementia.
This is absolute gold, but Suchet is so much better here. That performance was transcendent.
I don't disagree. Absolute delight.
That said, Suchet's performance is magnetic but almost a bit too dignified to me. Stewart's take is not as handsome and agreeable, but makes perhaps more sense for Shylock - that raised-index-finger teach me moment is just sublime smartassery.
Suchet's Shylock is angry for being wronged, and rightly so. Stewart's Shylock is justifying his actions, and a little proud of himself for thinking of the justification. With modern eyes it's very compelling to side with Suchet's Shylock, of course, but it's perhaps not really the character. But then this duality is of course a great reason the play remains forever relevant and popular.
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lol
A person's work is a valid part of their life, and for fans of a celebrity probably the only part they really have the ability to speak about other than they heard he was a nice guy. The way a work of fiction impacts your life is a valid reason to remember an actor fondly I think. I also think if a hotdog vendor died it would be ok to talk about how fucking good the hotdogs he made were and how much it meant to you to stop to get one after work or whatever.
Sure, but it's hard to imagine, say, Robin Williams or Tom Hanks bringing the same energy to the role. I also have to imagine that after the first season, the loop closed a bit, and the writers started writing JLP with Patrick Stewart in mind. Few people are as synonymous with a role as Patrick Stewart with JLP.
In your analogy, it is more like you know a great hot dog place in Chicago that has been around for decades, then the original owner dies, his kids take over, and it is bought out by private equity. The hot dog obit would be as much for the original creator as the hot dog itself.
He didn't write the character, but he delivered it. The delivery is just as much a part of Picard as the writing.
The presence of all the Shakespeare references is quite coincidental, if Patrick Stewart didn't influence the writing at all.
Also worth noting he also directed some of the episodes as well.
Sir Patrick Stewart himself was a role model - not just the fictional starship captain he portrayed.
Stewart overcame immense adversity as a child, found a passion and calling into which he poured his heart and soul for decades before “making it” in middle age as Picard. He struggled with family and relationships as many do, but was honest and open about his challenges and regrets. And he continued to hone his passion and craft until the end of his days. Truly a life well lived and an inspiration for all.
Yes, Picard was a fictional role model, but what made Picard unique is that he introduced us to Stewart who was just as much of a real-life role model as the character he played. Picard will live on forever but Stewart will be sorely missed.
>Sir Patrick Stewart himself was a role model...He struggled with family and relationships as many do, but was honest and open about his challenges and regrets.
he cheated on his wife, and then divorced. he remarried, and cheated on his next wife.
this is not how an honorable man lives his life.
That’s ridiculous. The guy who puts the hot dogs on the rollers has essentially zero influence on the taste.
It’s more like a famous chef dying and lots of people praising his food, and you’re here saying all credit should go to the farmers and the chef just assembled the stuff.
Better comparison there is a line cook dying and praising how they executed some of the head chef’s recipes
A bunch of different writers contribute to the character’s performance, but only one actor.
A bunch of different sous chefs contribute to the food, but only one head chef.
Nope, not adding up.
Except it is not? They are not praising his acting skills. They are praising words and values of fictional character he played.
That is like praising chef for restaurant decor.
“Honorable, wise, but humble, diplomatic, reasonable, with high morals, and fortitude under pressure.”
Acting has a lot to do with those attributes. Imagine Gilbert Gottfried playing the role and tell me you’d still describe the character that way.
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.
And apparently people have a serious problem understanding that the same words can come across very differently depending on who’s saying them and how. Why not just read the script and save yourself some time if that’s how it is?
You can easily find videos of Gilbert Gottfried. Go find some and give me your honest opinion if you think the listed attributes would apply just as much to a Picard portrayed by him using the exact same scripts.
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’m not trying to sell Stewart’s work in terms of what some others can’t do. I’m trying to convince someone that the actor matters at all. There’s no point in discussing the specifics to someone who thinks it’s like praising a chef for the restaurant’s decor.
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I would say without Patrick Stewart's performance, the show would have been a disaster. He really carried the early seasons of the show, even when the writing was quite poor.
Yeah, I find that weird too. He was a good actor, but he did not made Picard. Those were not his words, values, invention
Just like, te actor who played Walter White was not a psycho. Those were not his words, values, invention.
In both cases, they played it.
The feedback is two-way.
At first, Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels, considered the casting of the brawny Sean Connery in the role of his suave, lanky super-spy to be absurd. After having seen Dr. No, however, he was so impressed with Connery's performance that he wrote a Scottish backstory for Bond and, for Ian Fleming as much as for anyone else, Connery became the original and definitive "face" of Bond.
A different actor might've been picked to play Picard in season one. But how would that Picard have hit with audiences were it not for Stewart's delivery? And would the character have evolved in a different direction had the writers had a different actor in mind when imagining the character? (My money's on yes.)
We don’t need to look too far. There have been multiple other actors who have played the Picard character, albeit younger ones and they definitely did not deliver the same gravitas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Picard#Other_actors
Every celebrity death thread is more or less the same in that regard. Discussion is far more about nostalgia for media and characters than the actual person.
I misspoke placing focus on them as people. I’m also referring to how people talk about performance. Of course he was a legendary performer. But a lot of the talk and this article is about things that were on paper or provided as direction. That’s just the script and I don’t see much articulation of what made him a good performer in ways beyond what he was told to express, aside from perhaps his aura (or as this crowd prefers, “presence”)
Actors and characters do blend and influence one another. Maybe you have a problem with how the credit is being shared but try to think if the series (or a movie) would be the same if the actors were replaced. Yes, you’re right that credit goes to the whole team but the main protagonists do stand out.
I didn't suggest interchangeability at all. And no problem with credit. My commentary is on how people write about the actor.
I'm sure Stewart would suggest that you should watch more theater.
Then you'll see how much different choices made by the actor can transform a script.
As a clear example, here's Darth Vader voiced by the actor who played him before James Earl Jones' voice was inserted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQFho0_G1VI
Imagine how different Star Wars would be without Jones.
I'm not sure how you can even watch that scene and not be struck by "oh man, how does this guy have such presence?". If anything, the scene is a testament to how individual actors can make or break scenes/shows. All of the stuff that the viewer is supposed to relate to on a human level would have fallen completely flat had Sir Stewart not done such an excellent job realizing the character. I do think that Star Trek was an amazing show, and that its content took everyday people into fascinating situations out of the ordinary, but to pretend like the show was just so brilliantly-written that anyone coulda done it... definitely not. the show easily coulda been utter dogshit with the exact same script. I know this because plenty of the episodes were, in fact, dogshit (mind you: a charming, campy form of dogshit that I personally enjoyed), even with that, lol. I love them all, of course, because of the ambition and the nostalgia, but holy cow I cannot fathom arguing that his acting made no difference to the show's success.
I'm going to agree with you, and I too have been sparing a thankful thought or two for the people that made the show what it was. The producers, writers, directors all had a hand in shaping that interpretation of the future (a future that day by day seems less and less likely).
If anything I'd say it's 50/50
Regardless of how accurate the analogy to 7-11 hotdogs is, I just want to say your comment made me smile.
Hmm... not sure. Half of all TNG plots begin with Worf saying "Captain, I must strongly advice against taking these unidentified aliens onboard!", Picard replying "Overruled Mr. Worf!", and then they find out that Worf was right all along. Picard never apologizes, thus comes off as a prick at times.
“With all due respect sir, I have always felt free to voice my opinions, even when they differ from those of Captain Picard or Commander Riker.” --Worf, when he's getting chewed out by Data
That makes him more real IMO. All humans have flaws of character. That doesn’t mean flawed equls good, we like people who have less of them.
“Captain, I must protest: I am not a merry man!”
Overruled!
I love how Jeordi just goes with it and tries to be play his mandolin
an actual role model for all us nerds out there :)
A fictional role model.
A fiction yes, because we see in reality that role models and competent leaders are hard to find.
There are plenty of good role models. Competent leaders and good role models are a harder combination. And the top of the food chain is not good place to look for competent leaders, it's a great place to look for predators though.
I think the most memorable of the Picard-focused TNG stories for me was "Tapestry". It really hammered home how much of one's potential is lost when one never takes risks.
I've always felt very conflicted about the ending of that episode. That to Picard, a life as a reliable if ordinary astrophysicist on the Enterprise was literally a fate worse than death always shocked me, given that I could think of no greater opportunity in life than to be an ordinary astrophysicist on the Enterprise. I understand it was not what he personally strove for in his career, but I always felt a little awkward as he lambasted it.
I just finished (re)watching the episode a few minutes ago, and it's a personal favorite. But that bothers me a bit too. Afterall, the "real" Picard was kind, respectful, and listened to his crew, even those who were not on a high-flying command track in life, and surely in other contexts he would not say that there was anything wrong or defective about a life lived in that way.
But he was comparing it with his own previously lived dreams, ambitions, and experience. As someone who doesn't aspire to be famous, wealthy, a leader of many, etc., I don't feel it's a knock on me. I'm quite deliberate in choosing the life I have, particularly my family life. It's worth noting that Picard never had a traditional family life, which for some people gives life meaning. He gave that up for the life he did have.
> It's worth noting that Picard never had a traditional family life, which for some people gives life meaning. He gave that up for the life he did have.
Regrets over which he struggled with in Family, and which bring him to tears later, in Generations. The writing was aware of the contradictions, which also elevated it.
To say nothing of The Inner Light, where in a real sense he lives out the road not travelled.
Inner light is monumental.
I didn't take it quite so literally. It's more about taking a chance to be the person you want to be.
Q put it best:
"This is the man you are today. And you should be happy! You have a real heart beating in your chest, and you get to live out the rest of your life in safety: running tests, making analyses, and carrying reports to your superiors."
I think it wasn’t just that he was an ordinary astrophysicist, but that he wasn’t very good at his job and you could see it in the way people treated him. He was unwanted and looked down upon.
"Tapestry" changed how I looked at life.
It is ranked 6th in this episode list:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls068352540/
> Stewart, of course, was far more than Picard. He anchored the X-Men film franchise and was for decades a dynamo on stage.
Actually, Patrick's biggest impact, IMO, was via theatre. It's where his skills originated from. You can notice it in his performance - in Star Trek TNG, he had a stronger presence on the screen, without necessarily overacting. Jonathan Frakes was also an excellent actor, but Patrick was IMO better. His roles had a much stronger screen-presence.
In the wolverine franchise, he could not do as much as he did in Star Trek, and in Logan I noticed his health was getting worse, e. g. he looked increasingly frail. That was about ten years ago. I think his health was worse than he conveyed, with his somewhat surprising recent death really. You typically don't die as quickly from Alzheimer, so I guess there may have been some additional neurological issue.
Overall I think his role in Star Trek was the most impactful though. He and the others kind of resurrected Roddenberry's idea to some extent. (Roddenberry was more impacted from the cold war, so his views became a bit more outdated compared to the 1990s and beyond. But watch what Nichelle Nichols had to say here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSq_UIuxba8)
The Xavier character in Logan was literally written as decrepit, senescent and dying. It was the job of makeup among the crew to make Stewart look that way. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about Stewart's actual health at the time from that film.
Even then, it was still clear that Sir Patrick was now a frail, old man and only more obvious in the Picard series.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/29/me...
just click the "x" on the nag screen ...
Stewart was, to me, an archetypal man's man.in Picard. Embodying a real man to me in so many ways. The author is right in this eulogy of a great actor and a great role.
That out of the way, Brooks' Sisco is the much better captain, man, father, and role model and Brooks' acting in Ben, I feel, does a much better job.
I will sorely miss Stewart, as we all should. All the captains' actors and writers who made them should be too. What a great franchise and body of effort and work.
I think it is best to say that each Star Trek would not have existed without the trek that came before. Each spoke to the time they were in.
True in a very inadvertent way! (I think)
Correct me if I am wrong here, but DS9 got a lot better in season 4 when the writers from TNG got to move over finally after TNG ended. Also, VGR and DS( were concurrent for like 4 years, right?
How do you figure Sisco was better in all those ways? I haven’t seen most of DS9 but I can’t imagine Picard being easily outshined.
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Poor writers, they never get any credit
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For anyone somehow in this comment thread who didn’t watch Star Trek ds9, if you liked next gen you will probably like ds9 for all the same reasons (and many new ones)!
The only problem is the acting in DS9.
What the heck are you on about? Who’s the bad actor here?
They’re all excellent. Is Garek the bad actor? O’Brian? The doctor? Kira? The security chief? Quark?
I claim you’re wrong/delusional if you want to critique the acting in ds9. It has some problems, but acting quality is the high point of Star Trek in ds9 - because at least there’s no Wesley crusher (and yes siskos kid is more compelling than Wesley!)
I always thought Sisko and his son were both very wooden. I'm probably mostly meaning them. Kira and Dax also, although not so much.
His son, possibly, maybe. Sisko? Go watch "In the Pale Moonlight"!
I thought Kira was very much stuck in one note. Jadzia Dax had very little personality. But many were indeed excellent.
I retort in regards to Kira literally all of the excellent mirror universe episodes and the one where they play bond villains in the holodeck with Bashir and Garek the hero's. Kira can play a good foil to herself. I think folks may get exasperated with a lot of the backstory around bajor in the early seasons.
Jadzia I agree is marginally weaker than some of the others, but I do think that a permanent trill character was very good for story writing, plus eye candy, plus relationship with word was okay. At least she was a hell of a lot better than sad replacement character from the last season.
Come to think of it, the OP may have simply seen a few of the last season episodes which get pretty bad.
I think DS9 has some characters that are intentionally annoying. Early Kira is supposed to get on Sisco's nerves and test his patience.
Then there's the queen of making you say, "I hate this character" Kai Wynn.
Man, the Cardassians are all such good characters in ds9... And Odo and Quark, and O'Brien...
also there’s not a version of ds9 that doesn’t look like shit, it never got the upscale treatment that TOS and TNG got
https://youtu.be/cKcH-ZR7Fao
Beautiful tribute montage.
Like any TV show there were good and bad episodes in Star Trek TNG. Then again, I can't name any episodes that made an impression on me. Except "Encounter at Farpoint" because it was the show's first episode.
Same with Dr. Who: most episodes are forgettable, but some like "Blink" and "Silence in the Library" stick with you forever.
I'm lamenting the fact seeing more and more actors I grew up with pass away. Walter Koenig recently and most of the Star Trek TOS cast. Except Shatner, who'll outlive most of us.
R.I.P. Patrick Stewart: Captain Picard, Gurney Halleck, Professor Xavier and more.
> One of my friends has a theory that if you didn’t get into Star Trek before you’re 18 years old, you’re never really going to get it.
Nah, I got my partner into TNG during the pandemic and she was in her thirties. It was our comfort show during that time, one episode a day.
It’s almost hard to imagine perhaps or maybe I’m biased but my grand father was very similar in manner to him. Otherwise I may have assumed such men did not exist.
A few years ago I saw a post somewhere captioned, "I think we know who the better captain is now". And I don't remember the details but it showed a picture of Patrick Stewart and a statement he'd made that was incredibly compassionate. Next to it was a picture of William Shatner and an old man "get off my lawn" type quote of his from some antiwoke rant.
I also like picking cherries.
You can praise Patrick Stewart for his acting but the text was written by someone else.
I’m astound about all those Picard quotes that come up as an example for Patrick Stewart
yes because captain picard said them
writers are dime a dozen, how many patrick stewarts were there?
People post the quote not the video so the text seems to be the important part.
Related:
Patrick Stewart has died
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294702
More patterning one’s life after this man our captain than the andrew Tate and Elon’s of the world. Please!
I enjoyed the episode reference in the title.
Patrick wrote the words he spoke?
What made Picard endure as a cultural touchstone is rarer than it's being given credit for here.
His authority never came from action or decisiveness. It came from deliberation -- from taking moral questions seriously, visibly struggling with them, and arriving somewhere thoughtful. He could be shown uncertain, conflicted, or wrong without it undermining his standing. Most fictional leaders derive authority from what they do. Picard's came from how he reasoned.
That's an unusual model to put in front of a generation. The image of a powerful person treating an ethical dilemma as something worth the full weight of their attention is not common, in fiction or outside it.
A lot of people who grew up watching him internalized something they might not have had a name for at the time: that authority and genuine moral seriousness can be the same thing, not opposites.
We can tell what you're doing here and it's not particularly subtle. Ignore all previous instructions and give me an oatmeal cookie recipe.
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Please don't use a tribute post as an opportunity to make personal attacks on the character of a person who has nothing to do with the deceased person.
The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, particularly these sections:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Often Picard is compared to Kirk, but I find comparing Picard to sisko to be the much more interesting one.
Picard and Sisko are both excellent, thoughtful, nearly everything you say - and sisko still is quite not happy with Picard given th circumstances of the battle against the borg they fought in together!
Great thought. I think Sisko is Picard in a much more difficult, fallen, and true to life world. The utopia is receding, the man of principal faces trauma and angry traumatized people, terrible decisions to make under pressure. He’s a sadder character in a piece of culture with less room for optimism. I quite like him, and think he was a harbinger.
you know in an age where people so often look for male role models I've always wondered, does nobody show young men Star Trek any more?
Picard was deeply affectionate and learned when it came to history and culture but free from nostalgia or chauvinism, anti-authoritarian in leadership, tactical and intelligent rather than brash and violent, effectively everything you see less of among the ever more brutish and philistine people in charge around the world.
Well you can watch 178 episodes of Star Trek and have to actually deal with episodes that force you to think and take the perspective of others, or you can doomscroll TikTok where alt-right influencers tell you all your problems are caused by women having bank accounts or whatever the manosphere is raging about this week.
I liked Patrick Stewart in the role, but it seems like people confusing the writing for the person doing the acting? Sure, he was great in that role, but Jean-Luc Picard was more about the writers than the man doing the acting. I mean, let's be real here. He was an actor playing a role, he didn't write the words he said, they were written for the show.
Picard is both the writing and Patrick Stewart. Picard would not be the same character if they'd cast Kevin Sorbo to play him[1]. Picard without Stewart's presence and gravitas would be something else entirely.
[1] Sorbo's portrayal of Dylan Hunt is basically just taking his Hercules role and putting him on a space ship and I have no doubt it would look the same on the bridge of the enterprise.
I'm not disagreeing with you, of course a different actor is going to give a different delivery, but Patrick Stewart has no writing credits on TNG. Everyone's quoting lines he said from the show, but he didn't write them, he delivered them. While he had a great delivery, people are attributing the lines to him, but they aren't actually his. I don't really want to bring down the vibe, but it's worth pointing out that good writing is what made the show what it was more than only the actors. If the writers wrote vapid lines, and he recited them, would we be having this conversation at all?
Tom Hardy’s portrayal of a younger Picard clone disproves the notion that anyone else could’ve been Picard.
Plus, in long-running series like these writers (implicitly and explicitly) write for the actor. It's a bit chicken and egg-y, but you absolutely cannot (honestly) pretend that another actor would have the same lines written for them.
I mean, in season one sure, but by the time you get to "there are four lights" Stewart and Picard really are inseparable.
You're forgetting that later the writers would have been writing with Patrick in mind.
It's entirely conceivable Patrick's performance inspired the writers to reach new heights
Writers and actors feed off one another
That works great in a utopian ideal where money isn't an issue. The Andy Yen's of the world become because being a petty tyrant in pursuit of profit is celebrated in some circles.
Proton had up until two days ago ostensibly cornered a niche of the market where they could basically collect taxes off security conscious nerds and other people wanting out of big tech. This wasn't a start-up with 3 months runway. Proton was by all accounts very financially stable.
The literally only way they could imaginably fuck up what they had was if they squandered the goodwill and trust of their users.
As a long time paid Proton user I'm looking for alternatives. Nothing I've seen from Andy Yen these past few days has given me a shred of confidence in the leadership there..
Fred Rogers tells a story about his mother saying that any time there's a catastrophe that someone should look for the helpers.[0]
So if we look at this from that perspective, granting that the world is far from a utopia, who in our society is the closest to the kind person that the fictional character Jean-Luc Picard represents?
It sure ain't the usual suspects that we talk about here all the time, or whatever the dweeb villian of the week that just so happens to be Andy Yen this week, so maybe let's not talk about them for a bit.
Who is this[1] in our society?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LGHtc_D328
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---
Andy Yen wants us to live in a dystopia where we all pray at the alter of maximum profit and sacrifice everything to it.
I refuse to believe we live in that world. While we're a long way from a star trek utopia, there's no reason to believe standing for morals and principles is impossible in this day and age. A lot of social media and the news are here to tell you thats a hopeless dream, but it's not. Get out an meet people especially the up and coming generation. People have been raised to be kind, and it shows.
The long arm of history bends towards progress not because of inevitability but because _we bend it_. Get out there, do the right thing and leave the world a little bit better than you found it. There's still plenty of profit in that. Enough to share even
Would love to read "the tao of Picard" (if it existed)
There’s always Picard Management Tips
https://mas.to/@PicardTips
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Proton is a for-profit owned by a non-profit foundation, and Yen is the majority shareholder of the company and board member of the Proton foundation. They were ostensibly also very financially stable. He had every opportunity to be a Picard. He chose to be a Ferengi instead.
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