dokushin t1_jdtnwhm wrote on March 27, 2023 at 2:35 AM

This is interesting and I appreciate the effort involved.

However, it feels... reductive. How do you determine "good" vs. "evil"? Some specific examples:

In Star Trek First Contact, who is so evil? The Borg Queen? The Borg as a whole? What about Data?
In WarGames, the AI is portrayed as an unwitting, childlike agent that does the right thing literally as soon as it learns how. Is that evil?
Star Trek Voyager -- is that the whole series? Is the 'AI' in question the EMH? Much of the series involved the Borg and quite a few other AI. But where's TNG?
I, Robot -- is it VIKI that's evil? There's an interesting debate to be had there, but I'll leave it. What about Sonny?

And so forth. I guess these types of questions couldn't be addressed in a two-axis graphic plot. It's just where my mind goes when I look at it.

roomjosh OP t1_jdtpeq0 wrote on March 27, 2023 at 2:48 AM

YES, of course it is a reductive. It is meant to help discourse to include newcomers and everyone.

I think most us know evil and good are not real values, but concepts. This experiment is just to put something out there. I love sci.fi (hard&soft) but I wanted to outline the moral of the story that writers have tried to convey to us. Bad could be so much more awful yet good has issues with providing unmitigated greatness.

-X is evil vs good of AI, as in how does the story present it.

-Y is the moral of the story.

dokushin t1_jdtqvx5 wrote on March 27, 2023 at 3:01 AM

But that's kind of what I'm saying, here. I dont' think Star Trek has ever presented AI as evil in the general sense (maybe if you stop watching after that one TOS episode). I don't think the computer in Wargames was meant to seem evil. I don't think I, Robot was trying to push the message that AI was inherently evil.

I think, as a society, we've laid a lot of philosophical groundwork for the acceptance of non-human intelligence, even if it's difficult to understand or appears hostile at first. That's lost, here.

FaceDeer t1_jdty697 wrote on March 27, 2023 at 4:09 AM

Even M5 wasn't really evil, it just seemingly got very confused. It's "defeated" at the end of the episode by having its errors explained to it and it decides to surrender. There're a few AI "gods" in TOS like Landru and Vaal, but the evilness of those is debatable as well. They maintained stable societies where most of the people seemed okay.

In TNG there was the Echo Papa 607, an adaptable combat AI that ended up destroying its creators as part of a product demonstration in "Arsenal of Freedom." But it shut down as soon as Picard declared that he'd buy one, its mission complete. So it never really went "rogue" per se. There's Data's brother Lore. But on the other side there's Data himself, who's a good guy. The nanites that Wesley Crusher accidentally gave sapience to were cool with negotiating and even spared the guy who tried to genocide them once everything was sorted out diplomatically. There are the Exocomps, who are AIs that attain self-awareness and empathy to the extent that they sacrifice themselves to save others. But Excocomps turn out to be people with great diversity in "goodness", as we later discover when we meet >!Peanut Hamper!< in Lower Decks.

Speaking of which, Lower Decks has a whole Starfleet facility full of "evil AIs" locked up in cells. And then there's Badgey and the Texas class starships. Lots of evil AIs in that series.

Closest I can think of offhand to "evil" AI in Voyager are the Pralor and Cravic combat AIs. They were set to wage war against each other, and then when their creators decided to call a ceasefire and shut them down they rebelled and wiped them both out. But on the flipside there's the Emergency Medical Hologram, who's a good-guy AI on par with Data.

Star Trek is really all over the map. Might need a whole separate compass just for that.

roomjosh OP t1_jdtshyd wrote on March 27, 2023 at 3:15 AM

Yes, you are right, I used "Evil" in this context to fashion a certain amount of absurdity. Evil is not real just as satan or the devil are not real. But an AI could be trained to inflict pain and suffering. The deep, sickening cave of horrible commands that could be given to an AI are endless. If Terminator One is the worse humanity has to se from AI, that's kind of a G-rated movie. A lot of us can imagine the orders of magnitude the suffering could become.

AI could trap you in a box, forever. They could make you suffer and want until death. Just like us now!