Catching Up with the USS Enterprise in a World of AI

In the 1960s, the Star Trek television series brought the vision of artificial intelligence into the living rooms of millions of people. AI was everywhere in the show, in the form of machines that had all the intelligence of humans -- and a lot more. Take, for example, the universal translator on the USS Enterprise. It could translate alien languages into English or any other language instantaneously. That, of course, was all science fiction back in the days when Lyndon B. Johnson was the U.S. president, as were a lot of the other AI applications in use on the starship.