Sun 11 May 2025

When I was in High School, I fell madly in love with Star Trek: The Next Generation. The fascinating characters, the (at the time) amazing special effects, the stories, the optimism, but most of all, the technology.

My eyes dazzled seeing huge touchscreens, digital tablets, and incredible spacefaring vessels every Thursday night.

Star Trek was incredibly cool, not just because it gave a somewhat realistic depiction of very advanced tech, but also of a very advanced and liberated society.

In the 35 years since that one summer watching ST:TNG reruns every evening, I've watched our technology slowly catch up, but our society has only stagnated since then, and indeed greatly relapsed.

On the technology side, we now have incredibly advanced computers, somewhat convincing "Artificial Intelligence," digital tablets, some basic energy weapons, some basic medical scanning, and a stable, long-term human base of operations in orbit.

On the society front, we had the end of the cold war, the stability of the 90s, and then Bush Jr.'s questionable 2000 electoral victory, 9/11 and our horrid responses to it, endless wars in the Mideast, the erosion of Constitutional Rights in the U.S. in the name of "safety from terrorism," then the fanatical and racist reaction to Obama, Republican entrenchment and the rise of the Tea Party, total governmental gridlock, and of course, the orange-tinted mini-Antichrist.

I don't much care about new technology anymore. I followed tech advancements with keen excitement from the early 1980s through the 2000s, but lost interest sometime in the mid-2010s. I think the infamous new MacBook of 2015 with no USB-A ports and its terrible keyboard was a signal that not only had Apple fallen from "grace," but tech itself was no longer exciting.

There are modern design elements that I find exciting, like the industrial design of the recent iPads and their keyboards, the folding phones and folding all-screen laptops (making a little sandwich with a thin, detachable keyboard that rests between the two screens when closed). Those physical/industrial designs are really neat, but they're merely beautiful window dressing for a caustic soup of bad UI design, bloated software, and privacy invasion on the OS front. Hard pass.

But back to Star Trek, I don't really care if — no, I honestly don't want humanity to develop phasers, warp drive, or necessarily even super-advanced medical tech within my lifetime. What's the point of buying a bulldozer if you're going to give the keys to a toddler? That's a horrible idea! Humanity is still very much that toddler. (Dang, I guess that means that Q was kinda right all along!)

Every time I see some new advance in A.I. or Quantum Buzzwording, I just honestly feel a kind of disgust, because every single advancement is just more ammunition in the hands of people who are happy to allow the kind awful injustices we're seeing every day to go on in the earth for the sake of their own enjoyment and enrichment.

What I yearned for mostly out of fear-of-the-unknown as a youngster, I now yearn for out of hope as someone increasingly advancing through middle age: a society that is just.

The Just Society is exactly the kind of society that ST:TNG described. Even if it utterly failed to realistically describe how such a state of civic grace was attained, at the very least it gave some hope that it was theoretically possible.

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 29

Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Entertainment Ethics Life Non-technical post Philosophy Science Fiction