People Have the Star Trek Computer Backwards Posted: February 20, 2015 | Author: mikecaulfield | Filed under: Uncategorized |Leave a comment I was watching Star Trek — the early episodes — with the family a couple weeks ago when it occurred to me: Silicon Valley has got the lesson of the Star Trek computer all wrong. Here’s the Silicon Valley mythology of it, from Google, but it could be from any company there really: So I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer toStar Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.” This is what happens when you live in a town without history. The Star Trek computer, at least in the 1960s, was not ahead of its time, but *of* its time. It lacked the vision to see even five years into the future. It’s hard to get a good shot to demonstrate this, but here’s a couple to give you an idea. These are from the Omega Sector fan site.
For better or worse, Google, Apple, Facebook and others all are building the “ideal version of the Star Trek computer”. If we want to move past these quaint, archaic notions, it’s up to us to build something else.
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Transcript
People Have the Star Trek Computer Backwards Posted: February 20, 2015 | Author: mikecaulfield | Filed under: Uncategorized |Leave a comment
I was watching Star Trek — the early episodes — with the family a couple weeks ago when it occurred to
me: Silicon Valley has got the lesson of the Star Trek computer all wrong.
Here’s the Silicon Valley mythology of it, from Google, but it could be from any company there really:
So I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And
what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to
others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal
version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer toStar Trek internally when
they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For
instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that
way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively
relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition
and machine understanding.”
This is what happens when you live in a town without history.
The Star Trek computer, at least in the 1960s, was not ahead of its time, but *of* its time. It lacked the
vision to see even five years into the future.
It’s hard to get a good shot to demonstrate this, but here’s a couple to give you an idea. These are from