While I am glad this ruling went this way, why’d she have diss Data to make it?
To support her vision of some future technology, Millett pointed to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Data, a sentient android who memorably wrote a poem to his cat, which is jokingly mocked by other characters in a 1992 episode called “Schisms.” StarTrek.com posted the full poem, but here’s a taste:
"Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, / An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; / Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses / Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, / A singular development of cat communications / That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection / For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection."
Data “might be worse than ChatGPT at writing poetry,” but his “intelligence is comparable to that of a human being,” Millet wrote. If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works. But that time is apparently not now.
Life is only expensive under capitalism, humans are the only species who pay rent to live on Earth. The whole point of Star Trek is basically showing that people will explore the galaxy simply for a love of science and knowledge, and that personal sacrifice is worthwhile for advancing these.
Walk out into the wilderness and make it on your own out there, tell me how much manpower you have to spend keeping your core temperature above 90F. It takes a lot of effort keeping a human alive; by yourself you just can’t afford things like electricity, sewage treatment and antibiotics. We only have those things because of the economies of scale that society allows.
Yeah, capitalism is a bit out of control at the moment, but…let’s kill all the billionaires, kill their families, kill their heirs, kill the stockholders. Let me pull on my swastika and my toothbrush mustache for a minute and go full on Auschwitz on “greedy people.” That the Musks and Gateses and Buffets of the world must be genetically greedy, so we must genocide that out of the population. And we get it done. Every CEO, every heiress, every reality TV producer, every lobbyist, every inside trader in congress, every warden of a for-profit prison, dead to the last fetus.
Now what?
You want to live in a house? Okay. At some point someone built that house. Someone walked out into a forest and cut down the trees that made the boards. And/or dug the clay that made the bricks or whatever. Somebody mined the iron ore that someone else smelted into large gauge wire that someone else made into nails that someone else pounded into the boards to hold them together.
We’re still in the 21st century, there are people on this planet lighting their homes with kerosene lanterns. We still have coal miners, fishermen and loggers. Farming has always been a difficult, miserable thing to do, we’ve just mechanized it to the point that it’s difficult and miserable on a relatively small number of people. Those people probably aren’t going to keep farming at industrial scale for the fun of it.
Star Trek, especially in the TNG era, shows us a very optimistic idea of what life would be like if we had not only nuclear fission power, not only nuclear fusion power, but antimatter power. The technology to travel faster than the speed of light and an energy source capable of fueling it, plus such marvels as the food replicator and matter transporter. The United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity society. We aren’t. Somewhere on this planet right now is a man hosing blended human shit off of an impeller in a stopped sewage treatment plant so he can replace the leaking shaft seal. We use a man with a hose for this because it’s the best technology we have for the job. We do the job at all because if we don’t, it’ll cause a few million cases of cholera. Who do you think should pay for the hose that guy is using?