The future was stolen from us, and it started during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. What happened? There was wide-spread manic investment in computer technology and computer networks. This was low-hanging fruit for the holders of capital. What did we get? Shitty websites. A surveillance panopticon powered by the locked-down and cloud-dependent computing devices in our pockets which we still ever-so-quaintly refer to as “phones”. And now, artificial “intelligence”. Which, by the way, is technically just machine learning. Oh, and while I’m at it, “AI” is another bubble that is fixin’ to pop, just like the dot-com bubble did.

There were a few episodes of the original Star Trek where the Enterprise would find some planet full of village idiots worshiping an artificial intelligence as God. The ones that come to mind are:

• Episode: The Return of the Archons (Landru)
• Episode: The Apple (Vaal)
• Episode: For The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (the Fabrini Oracle)

I always found the first two of them kind of implausible. And being an incurable romantic, the third was just sad, because McCoy finds and loses love. But at least the premise of “The World Is Hollow” actually made a bunch of sense. The AI in charge was maintaining a static society in order to protect a large group of people who were making a millennia-long space voyage at sublight speed. It was ready to rebuild an advanced society once it arrived at its destination. And ya know, you gotta keep people from too much incesting and stuff. But the first two? Those planets were just full of bumpkins who got gaslit by computers thousands of years ago, and they seemed so implausible.

Or at least, that’s how I viewed these types of episodes until ChatGPT and friends came along. Now, I idly wonder whether it would be possible for a large language model to gaslight large numbers of people into worshiping it. Especially if they ever succeed with projects like Musk’s Neuralink. Combine some top tier automation, a large language model, and a bunch of Neuralink chips, and you get Landru and “the body” from Return of the Archons. Or Vaal and the “feeders of Vaal” from The Apple.

For that matter, the original Star Trek wasn’t too keen on AI of any kind, even when it wasn’t gaslighting oodles of yokels into calling it God. For instance, there was Nomad from the episode The Changeling. That was another computer Kirk talked to death, just like he did with Landru in Return. And let’s not forget M5 from The Ultimate Computer.

As Trek fans have been doing for the last 6 decades, someone thought up an in-universe theory to explain the original show’s take on AI. I believe the person’s name was J.P. Hailey. They used to hang out on alt.startrek.creative and possibly other Trek-related Usenet groups back in the 90s or so. Essentially, the theory was that humanity went through some sort of an AI crisis back in the early-mid 21st century. We came out of it on the other side. Because of course we did; Trek fans are nothing if not humanists and incurable optimists: optimistic in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Anyhow, that crisis, whatever it was, left humanity with a deep distrust of, and enmity toward, artificial intelligence. A similar theory showed up in one of the original Trek novels, Memory Prime. So Maybe Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens deserve more credit for that theory. Who knows.

Doomsday AI scenarios have been a staple of science fiction fandom for a long fucking time. They even made it into popular culture with the Terminator series and so forth.

But what I find really compelling is this notion that an LLM, top tier automation, and Neuralink could be used to create a planet of machine-worshiping yokels like the ones on Beta III in Return of the Archons. It would be especially easy to sell in the face of an impending apocalypse.

“Joy to you friend, peace and contentment will fill you. You will know the peace of Landru.”