I kept thawing the feeder to avoid such scenarios

Or, devils advocate, maybe AI was used so everyone could quit their menial jobs and innovate space travel. Maybe Yang’s UBI made the Federation possible? 😎

Yeah, perhaps the writers didn’t see the point in covering cynical out of control capitalism creating needless AI in every single consumer product and appliance. That’s total 21st-century bullshit.

I also like to imagine that before they solved wars and poverty, the people of Earth got rid of social media like we’ve gotten rid of smoking. Perish the thought of Mr. Data learning how to be human on TikTok.

Obviously the show was produced in the 90s and couldn’t really foresee our current situation, but it did feel like an interesting thought exercise to consider how AI, specifically AGI, would improve the world of Star Trek.

Case in point, Geordi La Forge often will have the computer do some calculation to help him figure out a solution to whatever problem they’re facing, but he never kicks back and asks the computer to solve the problem for him. And then there’s the maybe too-on-the-nose Borg analogy.

I know there have been AI characters in other shows and one off episodes, but their use is always limited. And while the crew of the Enterprise does interact with the Computer, it’s more a fancy calculator than a thinking machine. The crew still have to actually think and solve problems.

I always considered the character of Data to be artificial sentience rather than artificial intelligence. He was created in an attempt to emulate a human mind (and in that way limited from achieving super intelligence).