Today I was reading Noah Smith’s piece on Sir Patrick Stewart and Captain Jean-Luc Picard:
Farewell, my Captain - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
And while it’s good in its own right, I was thinking specifically about this, and the Moriarty incident:
This is in spite of the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably the single best prediction of modern AI ever to appear on the screen. The “engineers” on the Enterprise are clearly vibe-coding and prompting the ship’s computer, which is so powerful that it sometimes accidentally creates human-level intelligence as part of a holographic entertainment program.
And so I imagined a scenario, suitable for ficcing by someone with more time than I.
Because after that incident we get some poor sod back at Starfleet Engineering on Earth, staring at a CVE titled “Accidental misphrasings may cause holodeck computers to create people”.
(We’ll ignore the close-as-WONTFIX request from Q, who thinks the whole thing is hilarious.)
So he fixes it, or more likely asks Admiral Megaclaude to fix it for him, and the patch gets send back to the Enterprise as well as the rest of Starfleet. Picture the poor, beleaguered, recently-an-ensign Lieutenant in his cramped office somewhere in Engineering whose job is to keep all the ship’s patches up-to-date.
(The scientists aboard all hate him, because why should their observations be interrupted by the urgent need to take the sensor array offline because the Tal Shiar have figured out how to hack in through the neutrino telescope and order the ship’s replicators to print infinite tribbles. That’s just stupid.)
So the update patch lands on this guy’s desk, and being a good, competent officer, he reads the patch notes and the CVE attached to them.
It’s Barclay.