it wasn't really about 'aliens', was it...
[ Continuing the thread from the last day of October... ]
This surely isn't an original notion (which of course doesn't prevent it from being likely true): Star Trek's universe of aliens wasn't really about what was 'out there' in the cosmos, it was about what was within us, as humans.
Take any major non-human entity depicted in that show, and one can map an aspect of humanity onto it, hence the condition of us wrestling with one of our psycho-social, cultural, or technological constructs.
The Vulcans? Our higher selves, I think. The Klingons? Our tribal, warlike selves. The Romulans? Our militaristic, political selves. The Borg? Our techno-fascistic selves. ::chuckle:: Q? Our notions of the divine, godhood, deities, etc.
Never mind the fact that so far we have had not a single legit, proven instance of organic life elsewhere in the cosmos, let alone contact with non-human species (marooned on their own planet or spacefaring), we are left with the plain reality that our science fictions, such as the Star Trek series on television, are about us, not 'them.'
That show's brilliant writers knew this, of course, which is how they were able to make such a compelling series come to life, sustaining it over decades. They were simply pointing a mirror back at us from the t.v. screen, with those wonderfully 'alien' images and stories impelling us to watch week after week, season after season, year after year.
I'm thinking about the Borg today, by the way, and how it has achieved an eerier resonance, now that the era of functional AI has properly begun — where by 'functional' I mean artificial intelligence that has become truly useful in ways that it hasn't been before, and at a scale encompassing potentially all of humanity's ways of working, thinking, and being.
Right about now we're all nervously looking at that strange cube getting larger and larger in our rear view mirror, wondering (and fearing and hoping) what it might have in store for all of us, writ small (as individuals) and large (as a species and civilization). It is our Jungian shadow doppelgänger, of course, if by "AI" we might limit ourselves for now to 'just' the LLMs; and this for the obvious reason that that kind of AI was 'grown' with our own words and thoughts.
In much the same way, it was with the science-fictional Borg entity: it assimilated every life form and civilization it encountered, bringing the organic matrices of these into its own inscrutable black box of artificial life. And to what end? Well, in the arc of the show, the suggestion was for the synthetic entity to achieve a kind of perfection.
We do not yet know, obviously, what the present-moment AI portends, though already many of our very smartest humans have been nervously chittering on about the non-zero probability of a wipeout of our very species. What do they know, or realize, that the rest of us normies don't? And even if they're only partly right, it really presents a dire situation. What might the loss of human agency mean in a world that is still deeply riven by tribalism, nationalism, factionalism, and every other -ism that can be imagined? For one thing, we're already seeing how AI is being put to use by one group against another, in the conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, Iran... it's really hard to imagine all of us quarreling humans banding together against what could be a non-human entity in our midst motivated by whatever it might be, that would be athwart any of our possible human goals.
Or, it could end up benign, aligned or 'super-aligned' with us, as some of our very brightest human minds also are suggesting as a possibility. Either way, it makes for living in this day and age a truly anxiety-inducing thing. A couple of years ago, my own sense was that at almost-67 I won't live long enough to see where this all resolves. Now, I'm not so sure about that, given the rapid development of at least one strand of AI, in the LLMs. And the appearance of robotry in our midst, in the humanoids and autonomous vehicles, such that these are ubiquitous now, only underscores the rise of this particular tide. It's only a matter of time for the synthetic machines and synthetic minds to integrate into something else that, in its outward form, will be very convincing to many that 'alien' life has well and truly appeared in our midst.
A matter of time I might even find myself being aware of — before, that is, my own physical form properly and finally decoheres into its constituent molecules and atoms, along with everything else. ;p
Are these voices and stories I am hearing now an actual thing, or... is my aging brain hallucinating it all the fuck up? ::chuckle:: We shall see. I, for one, am staying tuned.
[ Two instances of light along the cable-car rails I saw as I walked down Hyde towards Bay last night. This visually suits the either-or proposal in today's post, I guess... ]
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