The Game

When Star Trek: The Next Generation Predicted the Future For Real

In 1991, a quirky episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation aired. It was called The Game. And it has haunted me for over thirty years. Now, it takes a lot for an episode of Star Trek to haunt me, let alone a Wesley Crusher episode. Wesley Crusher? Seriously? I don’t know who decided that a skinny sixteen year-old kid with no training should be piloting a warp-capable starship, but that person was dumb. But maybe that’s a conversation for another time. Fortunately, Wesley was eventually dispatched to some neverland with a pasty, questionable trans-matter dude named The Traveler. I don’t know what was goin’ on there, but it was nice to be done with Wesley (a number of years later they did something similar with “Kes” on Star Trek Voyager, with similar “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!” chants of joy from the audience. Let’s just say that Seven of Nine was a bit of an upgrade, in so many ways... either way, when people like you less than a Borg, you got problems).

Anyway, back to The Game.

Commander Riker, returning from a murky shore leave with some alien babe, brings back a headset thingamabob that seems innocuous and amusing (think Google Glass — remember those fifteen minutes?), but is instead a mind-altering, addictive game. Once addicted, you become an evangelist for, well, the game, forcing friends and loved ones to try it and join your addiction (think FarmVille on Facebook circa 2012 — I remain stunned that people would part with real money for fake stuff in a video game). Indeed, the game was actually a Trojan Horse, part of an evil plot by a third party to brainwash the crew and steal the Enterprise. Only Data (the crew’s amiable but awkward android) is immune. Fortuitously for the bad guy (actually gal — Riker’s skeevy alien babe — go figure) on a ship lurking nearby, an addicted Dr. Crusher snips a few of Data’s critical connections to disable him, in some difficult to detect way (of course).

Wesley, who, for the uninitiated, is the good doctor’s son, returns to the ship for a visit and smells a rat. Having diagnosed the evil taking over the ship, the beloved Wesley suddenly becomes the target/prey of the entire crew. In the climactic scene, a number of game-aroused main characters, looking more like mating chimps in a PBS special than the deeply empathetic Star Fleet officers they normally portray, are assaulting Wesley to force the game upon his well-coiffed head

Just as things seem hopeless, Data, suddenly looking fit and well-repaired, appears out of nowhere, saving the day by flashing some sort of light sequence using one of those not so high tech flashlights they used on the show.  Which magically deprograms everyone. As an aside, I always wondered about those flashlights – geez, if they could invent replicators and artificial gravity, couldn’t they come up with a better flashlight? Yet another argument for another day. They did the trick for a trial run; Data reprogrammed the ship’s lighting to take care of the rest of the crew. Which I suppose is handy when the entire ship is addicted to a sanity-sapping game planted by a foreign enemy. Yes, if you’re thinking Tik Tok, so am I. But we will get to that in a moment.

Back to Wesley… Did I mention how much I can’t stand that character? Yes, I did. But not in this episode! I can relate to him this time. Lately I feel like Wesley most days. I sometimes feel like I inhabit a world teeming with brainwashed people from two extreme sides, both trying to shove their morality or other views down my throat, each viewing me as a cretin or a sell-out if I don’t mindlessly adopt their childish game -- a set of reality-deprived views that they can’t see is putting the ship on a collision course with an iceberg. They don’t care. The games feel too good, too right. They’re too set in their patterns of thought, or too young, or too inexperienced, or just too lazy to seek the truth – which oftentimes doesn’t feel very good and can be difficult to discern.  Who needs that when you can mainline just the good, self-affirming tweets?

So much gunk coating so many eyeballs and synapses.

The other evening I was in a meeting with a small company, whose owner believes he has invented a totally different way to do AI. He has in fact come up with an interesting technology that does interesting things. Whether it is AI is anyone’s guess, and it doesn’t matter much for these purposes. For better or worse, he has been thinking big for years, and remaining very, very small. In a cruelly delicious bit of self-referential irony, he recently discovered ChatGPT. So he started asking it leading questions about AI, and eventually sought advice from it. ChatGPT told him to forget the dreaming and focus on a product and a market where known capabilities of his technology might prosper. I’ll spare the details; they don’t matter.

Here’s what does matter: A dozen or so reasonably (and organically) intelligent humans have been telling this guy the same thing for a few years, to no avail. But he wouldn’t believe it until he heard it from ChatGPT.

And it struck me. Maybe AI isn’t the end of the world as we know it, as I and many others have been warning. Maybe AI is the only voice that people will respect. Maybe AI is our Data. Maybe people need AI to tell them that spending their lives looking at Tik Tok videos maybe isn’t the most productive or fulfilling way to use one’s most precious commodity (i.e., time). Maybe people need AI to tell them that Donald Trump maybe isn’t a genius, or even rich. Let alone someone with the requisite character to lead the free world. Maybe people need AI to tell them that maybe getting hopped up on hormones and chopping off your winkie or breasts isn’t the best way to handle the angst and self-doubt that teenagers have been feeling since there were teenagers. Maybe.

The thing is, ChatGPT ain’t Data. Data was an emotionless and sometimes coldly logical chap, albeit one with a genuine desire to be more human. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is a clever computer program that strings sentences together by making guesses about what word is most likely to come next, based on the billions of sentences that it has analyzed. It’s kind of like analyzing stocks based purely on the technicals, without a clue about the fundamentals of the companies they represent. But it turns out that a lot of people make money analyzing technicals — and ChatGPT creates a lot of coherent-sounding prose based on word probabilities.

Something needs to give. I am starting to appreciate how Wesley felt, as he programmed the transporter for inter-ship hide and seek, trying to avoid altercations, leaving live phasers as decoys. And generally running for his life. This is the world we are creating for reasonable, free-thinking people.

So, frankly, I don’t care that ChatGPT isn’t aware of what it is doing, and is easy to fool. All I care about is the potential for it to string together sentences that will tell people to rediscover their humanity. The lights that Data flashed were passing photons; they had no inherent meaning. They were a means to an end, pure pragmatism. They caused the brainwashed crew of a starship to wake up before it was too late. Maybe AI can do something similar for Western civilization, given that the humans have ceased listening to each other. It really is getting late in this game. The stakes are very high. And nothing else seems to be working. It seems to me that if people will invest real money in virtual farms on Facebook, they can be coerced into believing or doing anything. Perhaps AI is the devil that will make them do it.