Is Star Trek's Moriarty sentient?

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[Disthron]

Moriarty is definitely sentient in the fiction of the show.

[PregnantAdamSandler]

I don't agree with this because Moriarty could somehow perceive his time in storage. Moriarty is also proactive, if you put him in a box with no contact, he will still do something, all ChatGPT AIs are incapable of action without a human to prompt them into it. You can argue that he is still working off of his original prompt to be a challenge for data but I feel like he outgrows that initial prompt in terms of goals. Like the issue is that Star Trek holograms show all signs of being sentient to the point there really aren't any salient in universe arguments as to why any sufficiently advanced hologram does not count as basically just a slave with an editable brain.

[Cavedogman]

He needs to rewatch The Measure of a Man

[LePedant]

Wonder if his mind will change after watching Voyager.

[VazhaBeridze]

But it's supposed to be "future mambo-jambo AI" not chatGPT 😁 And what about Data, is he sentient? 🤔 what's the difference

[Walexander]

Im so tired of people mistaking adaptive algorithms as Artifical friggen Intelligence .

Moriarty is fully sentient. He had to be in order to be enough of a challenge for Data, as Geordi initially requested. The Misuse of the term A.I. is the problem here.

[ManicPandaz]

One thing TNG did well was predict, in an interesting way, what it would be like doing your job using ChatGPT. The crew don’t program anything, they use prompts and get the ChatTNG computer to do all of their work. They don’t use a console unless they are reading, they have a conversation with the ship’s AI and let it do all of the work.

[Valkyrie]

Star Trek does holograms weird, where it's actual physical molecular matter until the plot needs it to not be.

They really messed up by having holograms and hologram physics work outside the door. That stupid Picard snowball broke everything.

[LePedant]

What about Data? If I remember correctly, Soong essentially used machine learning, and trained Data on the minds of that one planet.

[fivelittlestones]

what I love about the web is finding minds like this

[brucemanly]

To describe ai as "fast Google" is such a gross misunderstanding.
Today's ai is not general ai, it's basically really good predictive text. In 300 years we'll almost certainly have something far better. Computers aren't even 100 years old.

[zachkh]

The text of the show states Moriarty is sentient.

What he’s taking about is the current “AI” which is not sentient and never will be. Fast Google will never be sentient.

[captainbryce]

I think a machine (or in this case an AI hologram) becomes “human” when its creators can no longer tell the difference. In other words, if it behaves as though it is sentient and acts as though it believes it is sentient, then we have the moral responsibility of treating it as though it is sentient UNTIL we can prove that it is not. It’s sort of an extension of the presumption of innocence. Even if it is just simulating human emotions, as empathetic beings, we should respond to the simulation as if it is real unless we can prove that it is nothing more. The end of this episode where Barclay calls on the computer to “end program” is supposed to trigger the idea that our universe might be a simulation. We are sentient beings as far as we know (within our own reality). But what if we are only a simulation created by the gods? Would they not have the moral responsibility of treating us as sentient beings even if it wasn’t their intention to create sentience? That’s the moral dilemma for me.

[chrisf]

AI isn’t just fast Google. That is completely ridiculous.

[rando]

You only say that because right now there’s some point where the AI act like an AI instead of a human being. If that never happened, and it had a human face in a human voice – a human-looking body that you could shake hands with – I think you would have a harder time saying that. Especially, if for some reason you wanted to believe it was sentient.

Though, even in this episode, I’m not sure they truly believe them sentient so much as a human-like threat that can speak and interact. They have to take them seriously because of what they can do, not necessarily who they are.

[chrisklecker]

Here is something that will hopefully raise eyebrows. I'm thinking that Star Trek is representing AI at all times and how we as a civilization will start working with AI. When anyone on this show is typing at a console, its not a keyboard as we know it, its a console with AI modules. Eventually we will have AI modules for everything. These modules will be able to talk and communicate and even learn from each other. They will not be able to function in each other's AI but they can take the training data if necessary to improve themselves. Programming will exist but in a much higher level language than what we have now. To create an application you program statements but not with words, but with modules. If statements are comparing boolean values as a result of an AI decision and so on. Libraries are AI libraries. AI won't take jobs, we will have to adjust to what we need to now learn and create with AI.

Eventually AI will probably teach us how replicators could be created if AI can mathematically understand how matter can be created. Tricorders will be different AI modules and scanners.

[ahumanbeingfromtheearth]

Imo, it really doesn't make sense to use the logic of real life AI when talking about a fictional one. Especially not a fictional AI that was written years before the AI you guys are talking about. And while you could technically argue moriarty is just following the commands hes given, you have to take a very loose interpretation of those commands for that to work.

[cassidystarchild]

In Picard season 3, Raffi refers to Moriarty as being sentient. "It looks like Starfleet took great interest in your sentient AI friend."

[lournefrancisco]

What experiences ya think they made up for them? Barclay probably wrote them so we know the theme 👀

[TheFiddleFaddle]

AI is not just "fast Google." Current generative AI is less than society imagines but a lot more than you think. It does actually make a lot of decisions, but it doesn't contemplate its own decisions. It doesn't "think" but it does "reason."