How ‘Star Trek’ Writers Deal With an AI That Undermines Their Universe

Unsurprisingly, though set in the mid-23rd century, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is obsessed with the past — and that’s especially true of the new, third season.

As well as having Pelia (Carol Kane) on board — a crew member who was proudly and explicitly alive on Earth in the 20th Century — of the seven episodes so far, most are history-facing. In “Shuttle to Kenfori,” two crew members on an away mission meet two different, potentially fatal, legacies of the historic Klingon War. In “A Space Adventure Hour,” Lieutenant La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) tests a prototype holodeck by running a detective simulation set in the 20th century (investigating a murder connected to a TV Sci-Fi series that’s a lot like Star Trek: The Original Series!). The new archaeologist character is front and center in a couple of episodes but properly as the Enterprise takes him to a dig on an alien planet in “Through the Lense of Time.” Then, in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” the crew members meet the descendants of refugees from 21st Century Earth — “the best of us” — who developed and evolved in a worrying way.

So it’s clear what the series as a whole cares about, but it’s “A Space Adventure Hour” that I want to look at here — and that’s because of the way in which it addresses how the Star Trek universe can continue to exist in a world with AI. You have probably noticed AI — it’s changing everything about how we do stuff today, not quite 3 years after it was introduced. Just imagine how it will have changed things in a couple of centuries time (remember we had barely invented steam trains two centuries ago.)

Just like SF futures that include no mobile phones seem just plain weird to us now, it’s getting harder to suspend disbelief for Star Trek, Star Wars, and any future universe that’s not mediated by even the most rudimentary AI such as we have now. One of my friends, David Wilensky, who is a massive Trekkie, says that he has to bury this AI-lapse “down the memory-hole” because otherwise it would so radically undermine the Trek universe for him. Or perhaps, he rationalizes, because of its humanist beliefs, the Federation has made a directive not to automate decisions for cultural value. For his sake I’d love that to be true, but I fear that the competitive cost of such a choice would be survival.

But it’s not just Trek. The escapades of navigator Erica Ortegas on Strange New Worlds, Luke Skywalker’s WWII dogfights in Star Wars, and Starbuck’s Viper adventures in Battlestar Galactica are all equally absurd. In the age of AI, the idea that a maverick pilot could pull a handbrake turn around an asteroid and single-handedly save the fleet is about as realistic as a rotary phone on the bridge (we’ll come back to that).

Why? Because the moment you have an AI system that can process targeting data, predict movement vectors, and execute turns and twists at nanosecond speed, the need for a human pilot evaporates. In fact, humans become a liability: with slower reflexes, tiredness, emotion, a soft, fragile shell, and our inconvenient need for oxygen. And tactics? Forget the Star Wars trench run or the balletic duels of The Expanse. Space warfare in an AI era could just as easily be conducted by swarms of autonomous drones exchanging hypersonic projectiles at distances where the enemy is just a blip on a quantum radar — no dramatic close-ups, no comms chatter, no conveniently timed explosions visible out the viewport. Filming analog after analog of the Battle of Midway in space makes no sense, the whole battle would be over, out of sight, before a human commander finished saying, “Evasive maneuvers —”

Hollywood, of course, has no incentive to embrace this reality. Watching two clouds of uncrewed kill-bots silently erase each other across a vacuum is not exactly multiplex gold or grist to a streaming addiction. So we’ll keep getting scrappy heroes, improbable battles, and long, lovingly lit bridge scenes. But the truth is: the future of space combat is sterile, instantaneous, and algorithmic, with no dramatic tactics or stirring speeches.

So how do the writers address this, without scrapping the entire franchise?

By including a fictional space opera — The Last Frontier — as a loving spoof of The Original Series the writers can talk about how they see their own series in the world to which they are writing. TLF is a pretty blatant metaphor for Star Trek itself: a glossy simulation of an anachronistic storytelling mode. Perfect for making a comment about how Star Trek can be both schlocky and yet still relevant.

Every so often throughout the past 60 years, the Star Trek writers have clamored to be on-screen, most notably in the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars” where audiences are left wondering whether Captain Sisko imagined writer Benny Russell, or whether the whole of DS9 is just in the writer’s mind: “”For all we know, at this very moment, somewhere far beyond all those distant stars, Benny Russell is dreaming of us.” In “A Space Adventure Hour” the writers are front and center once more, with Captain Pike (Anson Mount) playing the role of the writer/creator/Gene Roddenberry figure, TK Bellows. (The name itself is a writer’s joke because “TK Below” just means “yet to come, see below”).

These appearances usually mean there’s something they want to get across and, indeed, rather than simply hide from AI, Strange New Worlds’ writers have chosen to address it implicitly in “A Space Adventure Hour.” Actually, the episode ingeniously addresses both the danger of living in an algorithmic reality and also the way that a schlocky show with no real internal consistency can still talk about the social issues of its time. 

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, when La’an enters a holodeck to role-play as Amelia Moon, an old-fashioned detective — fedoras, smoky rooms, femmes fatales — it’s not just a bit of genre cosplay. It is, of course, a homage to the many “uh-oh, the holodeck safeties have failed” episodes but also it is the first such episode since the advent of AI.

ChatGPT was announce almost exactly 6 months after the first series of Strange New Worlds, but even before Covid people were writing about an algorithmic reality through which the world around us was being shaped and constructed in real time according to what we want to see. La’an notes that they “built the holodeck on the back of a battle simulator” so “it has figured me out, learned my moves.” That is pretty much how contemporary theorists are describing our online worlds as shaped by AI’s using hundreds of thousands of personal datapoints. My colleague Sara Wolkenfeld has explained how today’s “online experience is inherently different” from actually walking through a “found” environment. Just like a holodeck, you are navigating through a “constructed” environment where “the sights you see were chosen for you, placed in your path by an unseen force designed to draw your attention in certain ways and provoke specific reactions.”

The metaphor is cautionary in the extreme: we don’t know what’s real and not, we are locked in, we are in true danger of getting hurt and have to recognize — spoiler alert — that our prime suspect is the person who online / in the holodeck seems like our best friend.

And it doesn’t matter that you need to suspend your disbelief. That’s not the issue here.

For fiction that helps heal, viewers need look no further than how Amelia Moon helped La’an recover after her traumatic childhood aboard the Gorn ship. But, lest any audience member wonder what the writers care about, they put the words into the mouth of communicator Lieutenant Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who plays agent Joni Glass:

It’s a yell from the writers’ room that they know the show is ahistorical, but that it has meaning anyway. And, just to prove it, Pelia manages to find some 1980s copper cable and handsets from the 1980s, using which she’s able to (spoiler alert) bypass the comms blackout in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail.” Running a 23rd century ship without AI might be like having a rotary phone on the bridge, so here, on the bridge, is a rotary phone!