How AI In Star Trek Can Help Us Address Real-World Issues - The AI Journal

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), countless conference sessions and seminars have dedicated inconceivable amount of hours asking what-if questions, with terrifying examples from across science fiction acting as the bleak backgrounds. Terminator's Skynet, Agents in The Matrix, and Ava in Ex Machina are just some of the fictional antagonists which have stemmed from humanity's own creations. But one franchise has spent over 50 years diving deeper than its contemporaries to depict scenarios of AI enhancing life, and in some cases not so – and that is Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry's utopic vision of the future has led to some of the most thought-provoking media to come to life. Topics of race and discrimination, death, and morality are some of the cornerstone topics that kept it relevant across multiple iterations for so long.