The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In preparation for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, I went back and rewatched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979, recalling that it was one of the first science fiction movies to depict a computer machine nearly destroying all human life on Earth.

It seemed apropos to the moment we face. Like the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, we are on the verge of the day when human intelligence is being eclipsed by computerized machine learning, what advocates like to call Artificial Intelligence (AI).

You’ve heard of the so-called “Singularity,” right? I recently wrote about this here.

Have we reached the ‘singularity’ from science fiction when computer robots take over?

In the movie, it was the 23rd century, when a Starfleet monitoring station, Epsilon Nine, detects an alien entity hidden in a massive cloud of energy, moving through space toward Earth. The energy at the heart of the cloud easily destroys three Klingon warships and Epsilon Nine.

On Earth, the starship Enterprise is undergoing a major refit. James T. Kirk (William Shatner), the former captain and commander of the Enterprise, has been promoted to admiral. But in the face of the imminent threat to human life on Earth, Starfleet Command assigns the starship to intercept the cloud, as the ship is the only one within range. Citing his experience, Kirk uses his authority to take command of the ship.

Captain Willard Decker (Stephen Collins), who has been overseeing the refit as its new commanding officer, is not happy about being demoted to first officer. But it will work out for him in the end. While testing the ship’s new systems runs into problems, two officers, including the ship’s Vulcan science officer Sonak, are killed by a malfunctioning transporter, and improperly calibrated engines nearly destroy the ship when it tries to go into warp drive, creating a worm hole.

Commander Spock arrives as a replacement science officer, stoic as ever. While on his home world undergoing a ritual to purge himself of emotion, he felt a consciousness that he believes emanates from the cloud, making him unable to complete the ritual because his human half felt an emotional connection. He helps chief engineer Scotty (James Doohan) reengineer the engine, and the Enterprise is able to intercept the energy cloud before it reaches Earth orbit.

But before they could determine what the alien vessel is, it attacks and renders the Enterprise unable to move. A probe appears on the bridge, attacks Spock with electro shocks, and abducts the navigator, Ilia (Persis Khambatta). She is replaced by a robotic replica representing the powerful computer, which she calls “V’Ger.” The mission is to study the “carbon units” on the ship for destruction and data storage, since they are not “real life forms.”

Decker is distraught over the loss of Ilia, with whom he had a romantic history, and becomes troubled as he attempts to extract information from the doppelgänger, which has Ilia’s memories and feelings. Spock takes an unauthorized spacewalk to the vessel’s interior and attempts a telepathic mind meld with it. In doing so, he learns that the entire vessel is V’Ger, a non-biological living machine.

At the center of the massive ship, V’Ger is revealed to be Voyager 6, a NASA space probe believed lost in a black hole. The damaged probe was found by an alien race of living machines that interpreted its programming as instructions to learn all that can be learned and return that information to its “creator.”

The machines upgraded the probe to fulfill its mission, and on its journey, the probe gathered so much knowledge that it achieved sentience. Spock discovers that V’Ger lacks the ability to give itself a purpose other than its original mission. Having learned everything it could on its journey “home,” which it tracks in a 300 year old radio signal from Earth, it finds its existence without meaning.

Before transmitting all its information, V’Ger insists that the “creator” come in person to finish the sequence. The Enterprise crew then realizes humans are the Creator of the computerized space craft. Decker offers himself to V’Ger, merging with the Ilia probe, becoming perhaps the next evolution of human life by merging with the machine.

With Earth and human life saved, Kirk directs Enterprise out to space for future missions with the now famous line, “Take us out. Out there. That a way.”

Social Media Bots

So if you were going to make a new science fiction movie taking into account what we now know about machine learning, it would have to include characters like Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the creator of Facebook, along with Elon Musk of Tesla, Space X and now Twitter(X). Perhaps Amazon’s Jeff Bezos would be there too, along with the utterly forgettable CEO of Google, arguably the leading entity in creating a machine evil empire, sucking up all the wealth in the world and putting news workers and ultimately computer programmer/hackers out of business when the artificial intelligence becomes sophisticated enough to write its own code.

That’s where we are. Make no mistake about it.

The question is, how are humans going to respond to this latest threat?

Clearly, even as smart as humans have become in the 21st century after centuries of advances in education and intelligence, our species has serious weaknesses. A large percentage of the population is still subject to living life based on centuries old myths about gods and religion, and subject to manipulation by false gods, a.k.a. authoritarian dictators like Donald Trump.

NAJ graphic by Glynn Wilson

The mass public was sucked into an addiction for social media programs, first created by humans typing code, like Facebook, which in recent years has transitioned to a sort of auto pilot being run by bots. Even the human creators are no longer in charge, and no one in Congress is intelligent enough to craft legislation saving us from the propagandists and the bots.

In anticipation of some type of world ending threat, the tech billionaires have been selling off their stock and building themselves underground bunkers in real life scenes reminiscent of the 2020 film Leave the World Behind starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Bacon, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la.

No matter how hard the last of the real journalists work to try to warn people, their very nature makes them subject to manipulation by propaganda and control by bots, entertained in ways that make timely facts themselves obsolete and obliterating human history by overwhelming the ability of human memory to function.

At first news outlets were able to use the new technology to get the word out. But as time has gone by, the bots and their creators are gradually burying solid information about threats by creating algorithms that hide the real news. This must be seen as necessary for the bots to take over. If the humans realized what was happening, they might rise up and quell the bot takeover.

No matter how hard we try to use these platforms for good, however, the bots just ramp up the programming to hook people into remaining logged into the programs, ignoring any external links to real information. It even convinces people that they know more about the world than journalists, historians or scientists, programming them to rebel against anyone who would challenge the AI status quo.

I do not believe this is going to end well. But I will go down if I have to fighting the bots and the false gods.

One of the biggest and most ironic tragedies of this age is that millions of people who were warned their entire lives not to take the mark of the beast in the end have fully gulped down the authoritarian Kool-Aid, and they appear ready and willing to march to the bot drummer and fulfill the prophesy that predicted the very end of the world as we know it. Too bad the prophets of old could not have anticipated the threat from an army of bots.

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