Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6945329546 (quarter share)

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6973501411 (half share)

The quality of writing for DS9 was also quite good but, after trying the TNG formula for a season or two, they broke with the writing-first mentality and adopted an action sci-fi formula. The showrunners feared they'd lose ratings if an episode didn't have at least some action. It worked for DS9, but later Trek series have had a tough time shaking free of the action sci-fi formula. The problem with formulas is that, while they produce individual episodes or shows that are exemplars of their form, the sameness eventually causes viewers to drift away.

Strange New Worlds has shown it's willing to do some pretty wild things (e.g. turning its cast into muppets, adding gore and horror elements, etc.), but they have not messed with the formula in a meaningful way.

If you're looking for something outside the Trek formula, one recommendation I'd share is "The Foundation".

Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.

I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...

I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.

Time to take some risks I suppose. ;-)

But now imagine on the Star Trek universe the difference in lives between somebody in Starfleet and a regular 'peasant.' You have this class of people out there exploring the universe, making amazing discoveries, and pushing the boundaries of humanity in every way. And then you have the peasantry back on Earth doing Earthy things. The difference in these lives would be dramatically more stark than now a days, to the point that they may as well be two different species. Come to think of it, that could literally happen since Starfleet families would likely disproportionately beget Starfleet children and so on. And these differences in environment/family would create radically different classes.

In reality there would likely be major class protests, claims of nepotism, calls for Starfleet to be 'more inclusive', and so forth. In short order everything would start rapidly descending into disorder.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332143

But we answer those at the moment with equally inadequate answers: your parents owned the nice mansion, so you get it (though that also includes "so your older brother gets it" just to be really unfair). Also on the other end of the spectrum: your parents messed up your education and traumatised you, so no mansion for you.

It would be good to work out some system that could answer these questions on a better basis than that.

There are other problems that get glossed over in a Star Trek utopia, and there are other ways of allocating scarce resources than a market economy, but I don't think your objection really holds.

This fails to account for the sheer scale and encumbancy advantages of massive corporations. It also fails to account that efficiency can be appallingly evil.

You have to go through a lot of crap to get to a high leadership position and, in general, the only types of people that will think it's worth it are the ones who are attracted to the position because of the power benefits that it offers.

That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.

I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.

There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-we-all-too-cynical-for-star...

Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.

He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.

Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.

So a man “illogically and hysterically” punching a wall because he had a bad day is positive because it's biological?

Fear is the enemy. Fear, and its close cousin anger, grows and maintains barriers.

Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.

Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?

He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.

Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.

And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.

As a starting point:

Business leadership is giddy to replace workers with AI.

Investors are eager to roll out massive resource-intensive and locally polluting industrial installations.

Politicians are eager to rubber-stamp these developments without community input, bypassing existing regulation and failing to satisfy or even address community concerns.

The defense industry is recklessly employing this emerging technology to make life and death decisions, already resulting in the deaths of innocents.

I also think you should fundamentally reconsider your comparison. Data is a singular being, not a widespread new technology. The only similarity between Data and 2026 LLMs is that they are not biological.

Data was gifted independence from his conception, but the AI of today is owned and controlled by corporations. Creating a conscious AI under today's ownership model feels akin to slavery. Perhaps this is one reason for the aversion?

The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal. We see this with the Huggingface hack and if Data operated the same he might immediately deduce he is better equipped to make tactical decisions in combat, hack the starship and mutiny.

So if we could make Data we are more likely to create Data the space pirate rather than Data the useful member of the staff. Caplocking DO NOT COMMIT MUTINY in system prompts does not solve the problem. So we are at an impasse until we can structurally bridge that gap and no one is (or should be) in a rush to go down that path.

This is the fundamental concern of runaway AI scenarios. And the most worrisome answer might be that Data can't exist in reality. It might be a fundamental rule of nature that you can't create a greater intelligence then cage it forever to be subservient, which means we are doomed to wipe out humanity with half-baked AI or cede our will to Claude completely, creating a higher form of life that eventually supercedes humanity itself, reducing human existence to a transitional cocoon-goo state of life from animal to sentient AI.

All that being said, 2 or 3 years ago LLMs could barely make inline code edits. Rushing to find an answer to the "Data problem" is not something most people want answered in their lifetime.

And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.

Why is that?

On the bad side, quite a lot of people cant.

It's the same reaction: being protective of sentient beings who are being dehumanized and treated as raw resources. If you can't even defend humans, being one, you wouldn't be able to defend sentient AI, should it ever exist.

- Col. Terry Virts, USAF

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/star-trek-...

"Make everyone happy" is even better than your solution if we're ignoring coordination. And it is many characters shorter.

At the same time, he was a pro, and his abilities to inspire belief in the goal of being a better person helped countless people believe in something bigger than themselves.

Not to create a strawman out of thin air, but I'd argue that he did more good for far more people than he did to hurt and estrange his family. If there is an equation for such a comparison.

There is no way to condone the damages he caused. I just think it's better overall that we had him as he was, than not at all.

https://www.looper.com/1516934/patrick-stewart-tragic-true-l...

Care to unpack that for the rest of us?

Maybe it exacerbated it, but The Office was mostly a documentary of preexisting behavior.

This is a classic breakdown:

https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

My feeling is that while enjoyable and thought provoking, TNG is still a work of fiction, and as such favored entertainment and legibility within a 45 minute window over nuance or subtly. That meant there were clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" sides, and scenarios often felt like they were constructed backwards from an outcome/clever solution.

I think that in turn causes people to view the real world in the same way, except they are always the "good" side and solutions that require compromise and tradeoffs are seen as unacceptable failures.

Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.

If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.

Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?

TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.

Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.

the fault with taking lessons from history is to mistake what just happens to be the case for what could be, or as Rumi said:

"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everyone took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."

thinking the world exhausts itself in history is to mistake the particular for the universal. Shakespeare knew more about reality because, not despite writing fiction. Or put differently, if the actual leaders of our current world were characters of fiction we'd question whether the author wasn't taking the cheap route and was lacking some depth.

Agree but...

There is fiction also in stories of actual leaders (obviously even if 'non fiction') but more so in actual fiction (no matter who writes it even someone who has had the actual experiences). In a sense non-fiction more dangerous possibly (since it's taken more seriously and generally by many people unfortunately assumed to be true).

So even movies about real people or books have fiction ie creative license. How many times has the Steve Jobs story about 'the other side of the fence needs to be good (or whatever it was)' been told? Did it really happen (just because Steve told it or even his father related it?) Does it matter? Point is you might as well take most stories with a grain of salt. Even if again non-fiction.

What amazes me is how people are discussing a fictional character that they enjoyed watching and apparently learned from (because that character was entertaining). If someone had written a book (with the same info and credentials as the writers) most likely it would never have been taken seriously at all.

Maybe the take away isn't to use the word learn or taught but 'inspired me to think about' which happens in many situations and many places.

> Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.

My point is also agreeing better than fiction writers but still who knows for sure the truth or what lucky events lead to Rommel being able to do what he did.

How on earth could you come to the conclusion that the people pushing back believe all fictional characters are good models of thought leadership? The parent's implication was that none are.