me reading dune at 13: "they got rid of the computers? that seems drastic"

me at 45+: "yep i get it. wise man, that frank herbert"

To be fair, Star Trek is pushing the idea of utopian society. Prime directive. Evolved past money. Spending time people and resources on exploration. To seek out new life, not to exploit or destroy it. Tech in those hands is going to be far different than the same tech in our society’s hands.

I dislike modern computers so much that I can’t even enjoy the old ones anymore.

I had loved the idea of a computer that was always listening and ready to go with helpful facts and analysis, until idiot tech bros showed me how it would really get done in modern society. :(

It’s one of the big contradictions of Star Trek… they somehow achieved utopian society while running everything on fucking touch screens.

I figure we're well down the path of the Ferengi. Rules of acquisition #18.

Soon musk will take out all the satellites and we're halfway there!

Outlaw ai and give the eggheads performance enhancing (and lip staining) tonics!

It's the near apocalypse in between Star Trek and Dune that's the problem.

I don't want the computers destroyed. I want the corpos destroyed who have made computers feel like an invasion.

Oh the myriad options of cyberpunk dystopia?

Wew...

We definitely will achieve Ferenginar if the EU succeeds at becoming the world government. The thing everyone forgets about the Ferengi is that they don’t have unbridled laissez-faire capitalism. They have one societal government with a vast bureaucracy, with one branch highlighted prominently in the show: the Ferengi Commerce Authority.

The FCA is so powerful within Ferengi society that their best comparison in historical human society is probably the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

We're more or less on track for the star trek universe right now. WW3 begins in 2026/2027 and continues with nuclear exchange into 2053.

pastel beans gang rise up

Imagine trying to fill out a leave request on that!

I'm willing to wait for 17 years and strat it

Is that also the timeline where Q put the crew on trials for the fascist phase of the human population?

Also holy shit didn’t realize how long that war was for

WW3 is already here, just with seasonal updates instead of the full product at launch.

Her at 60: wow i can't wait till we have computers again so my 8 year old grandson doesn't have to go to navigator school and consume so much spice that he no longer resembles a human being, has to live inside of a tank filled with spice gas, and evolve beyond the ability to enjoy mundane pleasures like hugs from grandma.

Cyberpunk dystopia came before the Star Trek utopia. Earth was recovering from that period of time when humans discovered warp travel. Warp travel is, of course, heavily dependent on computers. In Star Trek Discovery, AI is abandoned because it almost ended life, but you can see the slow creep back towards that path in TNG then Picard. Go forward far beyond the end of Discovery and you imagine a time when humans go to war with and subsequently ban intelligent machines.

I love how Dune and Asimov's Robot/Foundation series both have intelligent machines as a "yeah, that happened, and it really sucked".

It's fine, he can remember the hugs of his ancestors.

Dat holodeck booking form on key binding.

That's probably my biggest complaint about all this AI and smart tech. We literally have the tech to make what people want but it's being made for shareholders instead of people.

There was a point where genai could run on a moderately powerful home computer and could reasonably be expected to explain basic things and summarize texts. I had a small model that added conversational personality to my Home Assistant installation.

Universally connected tech is an amazing idea! I want my car to be able to send me a message explaining why it isn't running at peak performance. I want my laundry to remind me to change it or my Roomba to schedule its cleaning for when I'm out of the house.

The issue comes from all these things being built to benefit the company instead. Amazon pretends that Alexa is here to help you out and instead uses her to target advertising to your kids and sell every mention of a product to aggregate data collectors.

We could be living in a 1940's house of the future that tells the cops to come back with a warrant and helps protect you from the ai apocalypse because it refuses updates that would harm its family but instead we get to be trapped in permanent market research testing because these filthy rick fuckwits can't seem to figure out that we can't buy their products if the take all the money.

Billionaires: we will make real fictional things, like palantirs, metaverses, and squid game
Me: we will make real fictional things, like butlerian jihad

Placing your hand in a box is kind of like holding hands

Yet here we are

The navigator scene was absolutely the best part of the 1984 version of Dune.

We have the food to feed the entire world but it's more profitable to let people starve.

The entire world's fucked.

We get a lot of shit, as we should, 1/3 of our population voted for Trump, but I’m not seeing much moral high ground from the EU. A lot of the same oligarch fueled themes to control and demoralize humanity as a whole apply.

WW365 with Copilot

Great, now I don't want it anymore. You're such an ass! 😭

why stop at that and not to the part with the spice?

Not just food, but everything. Pharmacies dispose of unbought meds that people can't afford, the clothing that exists today could clothe the world for a generation and more will be made tomorrow. A suburb the size of America could fit every single human in an individual house and have room for the next 20 generations while leaving the world untouched. There is more copper and aluminum in most landfills than there are in most mines. The suffering is the point, without it we lose all interest in the development.

i love her hair

Yeah, decades worth of nuclear exchange? I thought most doctrine was to dump everything at once so they didn't have a chance to return fire.

Well, depends on the rate of exchange. Like, after the first, it took the survivors 10 years to rebuild their nuclear arsenals to go at it again. And after the third exchange, nobody was left who knew how to build nuclear weapons anymore.

That's why it took so long.

In Star Trek they still needed a global reset in the form of a nuclear war.