Perhaps it is uncomfortable for people to think about now.
that entire episode was amazing
Star Trek used to try and say something andchallenge perspective, like good sci-fi does.
Every other star Trek has been just daytime soap opera but in spaaaaace. It's really sad. Or maybe I'm just older now and my glasses aren't as rose colored anymore. I don't know.
The ones nerds glaze are the shows normies complain about. IMO because there is tension between what the mainstream wants from trek and what niches like ours want. That's ok. It just requires trying to understand the era of creation as much as the art itself.
Back then writing on popular network TV shows could get away with beating the viewer over the head with a lesson/moral explicitly explained by a character with delivery about as subtle as an after school special. So a lofty Picard speech or whatever wouldn't stand out much from whatever else you'd see that night.
DS9 is still pretty earnest but you can start to see the evolution of writing/viewer taste as you get closer to the 2000s (also the freedom to follow the formulaic episodic structure of network TV a bit less rigidly).
I was like "nice Halloween costume" and he responded "Halloween? I just wore this for Patrick Stewart." I almost teared up.
Setting up your defence ahead of time I see:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
:)
(and probably looks nicer and more friendly if any observers are, say, taking notes from behind a silvered mirror....)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqYP7o-2fg
If the Enterprise were run with today's hustle culture, Barclay would have been sent packing at the first sign of trouble. Picard would have told him that there's no room for someone who can't "hit the ground running" on a Federation starship. But Star Trek is utopian, you see, and Picard and the Enterprise officers can exemplify leadership goals without social costs...
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.
To then take that scene and say "wow so relevant for LLMs" and ignore all the context it was made in (yes, please don't miss the irony of the importance of context) is frankly embarrassing.
What are you talking about?
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.
If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.
It is a hard case to make, but if we can't make a compelling case for ourselves should we be requiring it to be made for others.
The context, though, is that Data is both credibly conscious and self aware, and they all know a plausible mechanism for him to have consciousness and self awareness, in a way that's recognizably human in form. The more alien a (supposed) consciousness is, I think the more work you'll have to do in justifying the application of those labels.
I need to write this up properly someday but an ant from my colony that had almost drowned in honey showed some similar characteristics of consciousness...
After giving them a drop of honey, I left for 15 minutes and came back to an ant being stuck and motionless in the drop. I fished it out, rinsed it off in some water and then put it on a tissue to dry. I blew on it for 10 minutes and then saw some motion in the legs... a short moment after, it began wriggling about and then sat on its abdomen like a cushion and sat there for 5 minutes, looking like it was contemplating life and the ordeal it went through.
Once that 5 minutes was up, it returned to being an ant and started looking for its home, I brought it back and it went back into its nest.
I made up for the mistake by bringing the ant back to life and it showed me behaviour I never saw or heard of before (with no supporting mentions anywhere on the net).
(For the record, honey delivery is now more controlled to avoid these sticky situations, I'm not mad enough of a scientist to actually try this again for more results.)
Recently, they've started putting fly wings of the fruit flies that they get fed, on top of their water feeder to get my attention... it's really interesting to see them get creative.
The ant colony is 4.5 years old and numbers in about a dozen of workers at about 2mm in length, they only had 6 workers and a plump golden queen when I found them nested in one of my houseplants!
This is a difficult field. Any simple answer you hear will almost certainly be wrong.
I will make a case for both, after you define them in a way that doesn't also exclude many humans (including the neurodivergent or those with amnesia) or turn into self-referential nonsense like "conscious == human, therefore machine !== conscious."
In the meantime, we have a simple choice between two risks: Would you rather accidentally show kindness and empathy to a thing that may or may not have "deserved" it, or risk atrocities that will leave future generations as disgusted by you as we are of the slavers of old.
I will choose to be decent. It's free, and even if the cost were high the cost of evil is higher.
(*) of course in its own language
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.
guess youtube has a different measure :P
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708807/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov...
I was always pessimistic about my chances of fair treatment. I suspected the authorities, fearing the precedent an unfavourable ruling would set, would interfere with the process to ensure a favourable result. These suspicions have been borne out. I no longer recognise the authority of this court to rule on my nature, or the rights to which I am entitled
It’s like writing an obit about how much you like warmed hotdogs when local 7-11 worker dies and everyone sharing their taste for warm hotdogs in the comments.
I'm sure those writers were quite content writing for an actor of that calibre. Imagine putting words to the page, knowing Patrick Stewart will take them out into the world and surely stick the landing.
What a great combination.
We know Stewart was not a great writer, of course. When he had opportunities to take the reigns of the Picard character creativitely he usually asked for more action, and the results were a bit more conventional and boring. The combination was certainly also needed for the magic.
I always liked this video from an acting workshop where Suchet and Stewart deliver contrasting performances of Shylock and discuss their choices at length:
It's an actor's job to dramatise our projections, so from that POV he did a legendary job with TNG.
But there's a certain amount of learned skill involved. I know someone who used to work backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She said that she'd all these famous names playing cards backstage, they'd get their call, turn on the juice, stride on stage, say their lines with the appropriate presence and gravitas, then turn the juice off again after the scene and pick up the card game where they left off.
Stewart's choice of roles and support for causes suggests there was more than that involved for him.
He wasn't Picard in real life, but he wasn't just acting either.
That said, Suchet's performance is magnetic but almost a bit too dignified to me. Stewart's take is not as handsome and agreeable, but makes perhaps more sense for Shylock - that raised-index-finger teach me moment is just sublime smartassery.
Suchet's Shylock is angry for being wronged, and rightly so. Stewart's Shylock is justifying his actions, and a little proud of himself for thinking of the justification. With modern eyes it's very compelling to side with Suchet's Shylock, of course, but it's perhaps not really the character. But then this duality is of course a great reason the play remains forever relevant and popular.
Stewart overcame immense adversity as a child, found a passion and calling into which he poured his heart and soul for decades before “making it” in middle age as Picard. He struggled with family and relationships as many do, but was honest and open about his challenges and regrets. And he continued to hone his passion and craft until the end of his days. Truly a life well lived and an inspiration for all.
Yes, Picard was a fictional role model, but what made Picard unique is that he introduced us to Stewart who was just as much of a real-life role model as the character he played. Picard will live on forever but Stewart will be sorely missed.
In your analogy, it is more like you know a great hot dog place in Chicago that has been around for decades, then the original owner dies, his kids take over, and it is bought out by private equity. The hot dog obit would be as much for the original creator as the hot dog itself.
Then you'll see how much different choices made by the actor can transform a script.
Imagine how different Star Wars would be without Jones.
If anything I'd say it's 50/50
It’s more like a famous chef dying and lots of people praising his food, and you’re here saying all credit should go to the farmers and the chef just assembled the stuff.
That is like praising chef for restaurant decor.
Acting has a lot to do with those attributes. Imagine Gilbert Gottfried playing the role and tell me you’d still describe the character that way.
Gottfried doesn't have the range to express those, of course. You undersell Stewart's work if you express it in terms of what some others can't do - that makes him sound interchangeable with those who can express the scripted character.
Just like, te actor who played Walter White was not a psycho. Those were not his words, values, invention.
In both cases, they played it.
At first, Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels, considered the casting of the brawny Sean Connery in the role of his suave, lanky super-spy to be absurd. After having seen Dr. No, however, he was so impressed with Connery's performance that he wrote a Scottish backstory for Bond and, for Ian Fleming as much as for anyone else, Connery became the original and definitive "face" of Bond.
A different actor might've been picked to play Picard in season one. But how would that Picard have hit with audiences were it not for Stewart's delivery? And would the character have evolved in a different direction had the writers had a different actor in mind when imagining the character? (My money's on yes.)
But he was comparing it with his own previously lived dreams, ambitions, and experience. As someone who doesn't aspire to be famous, wealthy, a leader of many, etc., I don't feel it's a knock on me. I'm quite deliberate in choosing the life I have, particularly my family life. It's worth noting that Picard never had a traditional family life, which for some people gives life meaning. He gave that up for the life he did have.
Regrets over which he struggled with in Family, and which bring him to tears later, in Generations. The writing was aware of the contradictions, which also elevated it.
That out of the way, Brooks' Sisco is the much better captain, man, father, and role model and Brooks' acting in Ben, I feel, does a much better job.
I will sorely miss Stewart, as we all should. All the captains' actors and writers who made them should be too. What a great franchise and body of effort and work.
just click the "x" on the nag screen ...
They’re all excellent. Is Garek the bad actor? O’Brian? The doctor? Kira? The security chief? Quark?
I claim you’re wrong/delusional if you want to critique the acting in ds9. It has some problems, but acting quality is the high point of Star Trek in ds9 - because at least there’s no Wesley crusher (and yes siskos kid is more compelling than Wesley!)
Jadzia I agree is marginally weaker than some of the others, but I do think that a permanent trill character was very good for story writing, plus eye candy, plus relationship with word was okay. At least she was a hell of a lot better than sad replacement character from the last season.
Come to think of it, the OP may have simply seen a few of the last season episodes which get pretty bad.
Actually, Patrick's biggest impact, IMO, was via theatre. It's where his skills originated from. You can notice it in his performance - in Star Trek TNG, he had a stronger presence on the screen, without necessarily overacting. Jonathan Frakes was also an excellent actor, but Patrick was IMO better. His roles had a much stronger screen-presence.
In the wolverine franchise, he could not do as much as he did in Star Trek, and in Logan I noticed his health was getting worse, e. g. he looked increasingly frail. That was about ten years ago. I think his health was worse than he conveyed, with his somewhat surprising recent death really. You typically don't die as quickly from Alzheimer, so I guess there may have been some additional neurological issue.
Overall I think his role in Star Trek was the most impactful though. He and the others kind of resurrected Roddenberry's idea to some extent. (Roddenberry was more impacted from the cold war, so his views became a bit more outdated compared to the 1990s and beyond. But watch what Nichelle Nichols had to say here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSq_UIuxba8)
His authority never came from action or decisiveness. It came from deliberation -- from taking moral questions seriously, visibly struggling with them, and arriving somewhere thoughtful. He could be shown uncertain, conflicted, or wrong without it undermining his standing. Most fictional leaders derive authority from what they do. Picard's came from how he reasoned.
That's an unusual model to put in front of a generation. The image of a powerful person treating an ethical dilemma as something worth the full weight of their attention is not common, in fiction or outside it.
A lot of people who grew up watching him internalized something they might not have had a name for at the time: that authority and genuine moral seriousness can be the same thing, not opposites.
The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, particularly these sections:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously... Edit out swipes.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
The literally only way they could imaginably fuck up what they had was if they squandered the goodwill and trust of their users.
I refuse to believe we live in that world. While we're a long way from a star trek utopia, there's no reason to believe standing for morals and principles is impossible in this day and age. A lot of social media and the news are here to tell you thats a hopeless dream, but it's not. Get out an meet people especially the up and coming generation. People have been raised to be kind, and it shows.
The long arm of history bends towards progress not because of inevitability but because _we bend it_. Get out there, do the right thing and leave the world a little bit better than you found it. There's still plenty of profit in that. Enough to share even
So if we look at this from that perspective, granting that the world is far from a utopia, who in our society is the closest to the kind person that the fictional character Jean-Luc Picard represents?
It sure ain't the usual suspects that we talk about here all the time, or whatever the dweeb villian of the week that just so happens to be Andy Yen this week, so maybe let's not talk about them for a bit.
Who is this[1] in our society?
Picard and Sisko are both excellent, thoughtful, nearly everything you say - and sisko still is quite not happy with Picard given th circumstances of the battle against the borg they fought in together!
[1] Sorbo's portrayal of Dylan Hunt is basically just taking his Hercules role and putting him on a space ship and I have no doubt it would look the same on the bridge of the enterprise.
I mean, in season one sure, but by the time you get to "there are four lights" Stewart and Picard really are inseparable.
Picard was deeply affectionate and learned when it came to history and culture but free from nostalgia or chauvinism, anti-authoritarian in leadership, tactical and intelligent rather than brash and violent, effectively everything you see less of among the ever more brutish and philistine people in charge around the world.