Perhaps it is uncomfortable for people to think about now.
Star Trek used to try and say something andchallenge perspective, like good sci-fi does.
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 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...
guess youtube has a different measure :P
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.
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.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708807/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov...
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.
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.
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.
If anything I'd say it's 50/50
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.
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.
A bunch of different sous chefs contribute to the food, but only one head chef.
Nope, not adding up.
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.
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.)
just click the "x" on the nag screen ...
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.
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)
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!)
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?
[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.
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!
Strong principals don't work when you have investors to contend with that will kick you out for one bad quarter.
In the age where biology doesn't seem to matter anymore and feelings rule over facts, the Picards of the world will be shunned, censored, and cancelled.