Symbols are easier than actual people. Nobody is just one thing, and complexity doesn’t travel well. Revolutionaries are either lionized or demonized, and so it becomes easier for the critics to ignore valid points while simultaneously being easier for the supporters to ignore atrocities. Rather than an objective, complete understanding of the man, you get polarized factions that don’t see each other as people.

Sure, of course it’s all fiction. LLMs didn’t exist as a concept when TNG was being written, so of course they didn’t write them to do that. Data was also an AI, and the holodeck was able to create a Moriarty so intelligent that he became self-aware and avoided deletion.

My point is that modern LLMs are an approximation of intelligence that permit contemporary computers to respond to novel stimuli in a way that seems like intelligence. The computer on the show was far more advanced because it was fictional and set in the distant future. They never bothered to explain how it works, but there was nothing approximate about the intelligence it created in the holodeck.

It doesn’t. An LLM uses modeling to approximate the shape of a question and generate a novel answer within the parameters. It’s like a shortcut to actually knowing everything and providing authoritative answers.

Sort of like the Scrabble champion who won in Spanish and French despite not knowing those languages. He simply learned patterns of words he could build with letters, but he didn’t know the meaning of any of the words.

The holodeck ostensibly has access to all of federation knowledge and history, and when it has to generate novel information (like what would Einstein say to Newton while playing poker) then it extrapolates that informtation based on the sum total of existing information. The holodeck computer has a thorough understanding of the question, the parameters, and the answers (holograms) it creates. It isn’t abstracting the question or approximating the shape of the answer.

I sort of had that happen to me. In middle school, someone started a rumor that I was gay. This was early 90s, and I was young, so it bothered me. I was new to the district, and didn’t have many friends, and being called “gay” was something bad in my mind.

But then I suddenly had a bunch of friends who were being really supportive. Some were gay, some were straight, but everyone just encouraged each other to be who they are. I learned a lot from them about acceptance and being myself. Years passed.

But none of them ever asked me if I was gay. Anyone that asked, I would say “no, I’m straight.” Apparently people thought I was in denial.

But then I asked a girl out, and she was like, “Wait, but… Aren’t you gay?” The look on her face is seared into my subconscious. It was a mixture of confusion, betrayal, and contempt. Like I had been pretending to be gay to worm my way into her friendship, all the while being a lecherous creep waiting to strike.

Also it turns out, one of my gay friends was working up the courage to ask me out. It was the talk of the lunch table, except they had been keeping it from me because they didn’t want to embarrass our friend.

So I had to go to that friend and explain that I liked them as a friend, but I was not attracted to men. He then claimed that he wasn’t interested in me, which was really fucking confusing. And then I had to clarify to everyone at the lunch table that I was, and had always been, straight. Which is weird enough, but I had also now rejected one friend and creeped on another.