Earlier I wrote about how William Shatner co-created a cycle of cyberpunk novels in the 1990s called Tekworld. It revolved around a narcotics detective of the future who busted drug lords peddling addictive cybernetic simulations. I believe Shatner was making an ethical claim about reality that was perhaps a natural one for his generation and one that was consistent with his experience of mid to late twentieth century humanist apprehensions about technology. Unsurprisingly, this is a view consistent with Shatner’s Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek.
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Star Trek has always stood a little aside from most science fiction. It was a bit more utopian, more liberal, and the conscience of Captain Kirk was its heartbeat. Kirk blended the reason of Spock and passion of Dr. McCoy with his own charismatic daring-do. But the 1960’s Star Trek did something else that to our eyes seems remarkable. The computer in Star Trek is not this omnipresent force of surveillance. You couldn’t just shout to the air and get a response like in the Next Generation. The computer was still depicted as a box you had to go to in a special room, plug in some memory cartridges, click a switch, toggle, or button, and it would speak back in a robotic way. The voice yet imperfect, mechanical, the computer not personified with human name. There was no hint of artificial intelligence here, it was just “the computer,” and it certainly wasn’t in control.
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As utopian as Star Trek is, the computer is not included as the driver of its society. It is a tool only. In multiple episodes of the original series, Kirk confronts computers which have become too powerful. In “The Changling” a rogue probe of artificial intelligence becomes a genocidal machine killing billions for their imperfections mistakes Kirk for its creator. Kirk becomes its destroyer by proving that the computer itself is imperfect.
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Then there is Landru, a computer that manages a passive society in “Return of the Archons.” It’s a kind of chess master for a society that has not developed or known conflict for thousands of years. Kirk defies the Prime Directive and smashes it to bits. The hapless natives are told to adapt and grow.
In “I, Mudd,” con artist Harry Mudd sought control over a planet of androids. The androids plotted to infiltrate and restrain the aggressive impulses of humanity. But once again, Kirk defies them with logical paradoxes which blows up their circuits.
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In “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Kirk is confronted with his android double. Kirk smashes the replicant machine in a condemnation of their falsehood and the android’s inability to love or really be alive.
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In “The Apple,” the crew encounter a hunter-gatherer species of albino-like folks who live in a jungle where they worship a magical provider in the shape of a snake head on a mountain. What is primitive religion to the locals turns out to be an ancient computer masterminding the Edenic community. Kirk interprets a loophole in the Prime Directive and has the Enterprise blow up the computer, casting the locals into a culture crisis where they can “develop.” This exit from Eden is a theme repeated throughout Star Trek, as Kirk the moral humanist insists on human liberty from computerized paternalism or over-reach into human autonomy.
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The perfection of this narrative comes in “The Ultimate Computer” where his ship and wits, a la John Henry, are tested against a computerized ship guided by an AI called the M5. The M5, of course, over-reaches with its own initiatives and has to be defeated.
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Kirk smashes computers because human autonomy, creativity and decision-making are sacrosanct, protected. Humanity is trusted. Systems of illusion, systems of manipulation, godlike aliens who enjoy toying with people for their own amusement. Kirk smashes all of these systems. In sort of a humanistic not-this, not-that ritual declaring a kind of heroic autonomy for the human individual.
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One might chalk up all the computer smashing to the context of the 1960’s unfamiliarity with computers. We might say that they just weren’t used to them yet and projected their fears onto the unknown.
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But what if it’s really the opposite? What if this human reaction against the over-reach of the computer was a proper reaction and it is us who are inundated by computing power and pacified by its omnipotence who are blind to levels of human autonomy that we have relinquished to a powerful system? When the digital has encircled and entombed all life, all transactions, all entertainment, all social relations, is not the natural consequence of this further docility, further acquiescence to the digital? When there is no longer resistance when all emotions are co-opted, sublimated by this system.
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In Eriksonian developmental psychology, the failure to achieve basic human autonomy in childhood becomes a crisis of shame and doubt. In essence, we begin to doubt our own thoughts, doubt our own perceptions, our own mind, our own creativity, our own decision making, when the computer can do everything better than us. Human bravery and ingenuity becomes co-opted at this point where computers are no longer tools for us, but we adapt ourselves to its digital insistence. The computer, in essence becomes God. Only this god doesn’t communicate through visions, dreams and the imagination, but is now real, embedded in countless networks, appearing everywhere all knowing, all seeing, all thinking, all powerful. Humans its slaves, tending to its circuits, keeping its servers cool, worshiping at the alters of screens.
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You can’t create this system without expecting some sort of emotional reactivity. Anger, depression, an existential malaise that grows and grows. What is left to do when the computers automate everything and subconsciously manipulate our behaviors, turning people into puppets of the algorithms? And maybe that reactivity isn’t all wrong. What would Kirk do with this system? He smashes it in the name of red-blooded humanity, warts and all.
A Fragile Dignity 