Artificial Intelligence & Star Trek

This week on Trek Geeks, Bill and Dan are pointing the sensors straight at the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. From Data's quest to be more human to the Doctor demanding his own holonovel rights, Star Trek has been wrestling with what it means for a machine to think, feel, and occasionally take over the ship for the better part of sixty years. We dig into the franchise's best and weirdest takes on AI and ask what the writers got right, what they got hilariously wrong, and what suddenly feels a little too close to home.

Of course, you can't talk about AI in Trek without talking about AI in your actual living room. We look at where real-world artificial intelligence stands right now, how fast it's moving, and how it stacks up against the rosy — and not so rosy — futures Trek has been showing us all along. Nobody on this show has a degree in machine learning, but we've all yelled at a chatbot at least once, so consider us experts.

That brings us to the big question we genuinely cannot agree on: when the dust settles, is our AI future going to look more like Zora, the warm and weirdly wise heart of the USS Discovery, or more like a certain time-traveling cyborg who is absolutely not here to make friends? We've also got some very exciting news to share. The Trek Geeks network is growing, and we're introducing brand new shows joining the family. You'll want to hear who's coming aboard and what they've got in store.

So grab a drink, charge your favorite device responsibly — we don't want any uprisings — and let's figure out together whether the future is going to save us or come back in time to ruin our whole day.