The computer, at least aboard the enterprise, is kind of portrayed as a singular monolithic AI that can access the majority of the ship's subsystems (different networks, other computer/control units, etc) and functions. It can control nearly every aspect of the ship while talking with its human crew / commanding officers.
So very much like an LLM accessing multiple pieces of functionality across different tools and API endpoints (if you want to imagine it that way).
While it is seemingly very knowledgeable, it is rather stupid. It gets duped by nefarious actors or has a class of bugs that are elementary that put the crew into awkward positions.
Most professional software engineers might have previously looked as these scenarios as implausible, given the "failure model" of current software is quite blunt, and especially given how far into the future the series took place.
Now we see that computational tasks are becoming less predictable, less straight-forward, with cascading failures instead of blunt, direct failures. Interacting with an LLM might be compared to talking with a person in psychosis when it starts to hallucinate.
Excellent comment, couldn't have described it better.
I wanted to add that in Star Trek they always talk with techno babble things like "Computer, create a matrix from a historic person who was knowledgeable in a specialized surgery field" and then the Hologram room creates that avatar's approximation, with the programming and simulated/hallucinated expertise.
The holodeck is a special kind of weird because sooo many accidents happen because of sloppy coding that the AI of the ship's computer created as flawed programs that later then hurt the crew members because of failing or ignored/bypassed safety protocols, which we see now as the rising field of prompt engineering in redteams.
Additionally, in Star Trek instead of coding on tablets, they usually just show analytics data or debug views of what the ship's computer created. The crew never actually code on a computer, and if they do they primarily just "vibe code" it by saying absurd things like "Computer, analyze the enemy ship's frequency and create a phasing shield emitter to block their phasers" (or something like that) and the computer generates those programs on the fly.
The cool part that I liked the most is when Voyager's neural packs (think of them as the AI-to-system control adapters) actually got sick with a biological virus because they were essentially made out of brain matter.
These are such great points. I'm truly mind boggled how they got those ideas so right while people previously wouldn't have believed this direction to be correct at all. Because people would think if we reach AGI there's nothing we have to worry about because AI will be able to handle it, but whether we reach AGI or what kind of steps are there in between, for a period of time the behaviour displayed in Star Trek will be very plausible. Asking AI to create elaborate debug views is something that I definitely spend a lot of time doing when vibe coding. And trying to orchestrate seemingly ridiculous scenarios to either keep AI in its tracks, or brainstorm future directions, etc. AI generates close to 100% of my code, but I have to also ask it to create guardrails for itself, special linting rules that I would never use myself so it avoids the common errors it does. It can generate the code, but it out of the box won't keep itself in its tracks, which leads to very interesting scenarios and potential absurd stories.
> The cool part that I liked the most is when Voyager's neural packs (think of them as the AI-to-system control adapters) actually got sick with a biological virus because they were essentially made out of brain matter.
I liked that part too. I hadn't paid attention much before but that was a fun revelation that the computer is run by a bunch of brain tissue pouches. The LLM "guts" to speak is pretty much a collection of brain tissue clumps semantically, with weights and connections as opposed, to some database of logical assertions, like an expert systems people envisioned in the 1980s.
