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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Neither Star Wars or Star trek go into very much depth of how their societies actually work. Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated.

Star Wars says it's capitalist, but I don't believe it. In many of the scenes you see people doing jobs that could easily be done by droids. Even their wars are fought with droids - or manufactured humans that are treated like droids. Droids are generally intelligent and can basically do any job people can do. Why do they need people at all?

Star trek has that problem too. How often do the characters ask the computer to do pretty complex tasks? Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated?

All science fiction paints a 20th century society with a pretty futuristic backdrop and props. But things like AI and replicators would radically change the way things work. And create a society very different than what we know. Quite possibly one without humans. What would really happen if any lunatic could replicate parts for WMDs? Or if robots that were really smarter than humans appeared?

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Droids seem to largely hold the same position in Star Wars that slaves did, except nobody seems to be worried about a Droid rebellion - and in slave-owning societies, many jobs were done by free citizens for pay.

And as far as Star Trek and AI, it's a weird problem that doesn't make any sense. It seems that you can't program your VCR without spawning a self-aware AI entity - Wesley Crusher accidentally creates one while doing a homework assignment, and the Enterprise (D) computer spawns one after someone casually requests a harder Holodeck challenge. And yet, Data and Lore are rarities, the possibilities of the EMH are completely unexplored and EMHs are, in fact, treated as Roombas instead of potentially sapient citizens.

Wasn't there like a whole bunch of EMH's running a whole ship or something. They are sentient. Star Trek makes no sense whatsoever in that the holodeck is so real you can fall in love in the holodeck. So why does anyone need to go anywhere. You can stay wherever you want, safely, and be wherever you want to be and explore whatever robots or holograms running around in ships have explored.

Most of the adventure, if that's what this is about, is carried out by the executives at great risk to themselves. It seems that there is a huge crew of peons who just make the ship run. And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business. From a realistic point of view the Star Trek universe seems insane.

I believe the holodeck was always fully reserved and that not dislike alcohol, most people attempted moderation. But there are several episodes that people become addicted to the holodeck

Well it's implied that holodeck time is inherently limited. Not everyone has one. The Enterprise (D) only had a handful for over 1,000 people. On DS9, you had to rent them at Quarks.

This brings up another point that is never addressed. Quark runs a casino / bar / futuristic (adult) movie theater expressly for profit. It's also implied that Star Fleet members don't get paid because they are members of the federation. Yet these same officers are often seen frequenting Quark's place. Where did they get the latinum (money)?

The Federation is a socialist society internally, but presumably still uses money/valuable commodities for trade with other civilizations.

(Honestly, they totally hand-wave why you can't just replicate latinum)

That's a contradiction in the show. In some places, they laugh about the concept of "money", and in others they clearly have and use money like you point out, and talk about "Federation credits". It's one of the really annoying things about Star Trek, because they clearly didn't think it through.

For the episodes where they aren't dealing with extra-Federation societies like the Ferengi, it makes perfect sense to not talk about money on the ship. It's not much different than being in the Navy today: if you work on a US Navy ship, you don't have to pay to see the doctor, or to go to the mess hall and eat, etc. All that stuff is free. It's part of being a crewmember on a ship. It's the same on the Enterprise-D (or even Kirk's Enterprise), except they have even better benefits (e.g. replicators; on modern Navy ships there's I believe a little store where you can buy extra goodies they don't give away in the mess hall, but with replicators you wouldn't need this). Gene's idea of modeling Starfleet on the Navy worked out pretty well this way for a while, until they started dealing with jurisdictions outside of Federation control and then they had to retcon stuff like "gold-pressed latinum".

Economics is never addressed in Star Trek, but I could see an administrative solution to such issues. Inside Starfleet there is little to no money, as replicators are readily available. The power supply and replicators themselves would be there anyway, so giving the crew access is a freebie. And the civilian society on advanced worlds would be similar, with manufacture of material possessions too cheap to worry about.

On worlds still using money with which Starfleet interacts, the local administration could simply make an arrangement with the local purveyors of desired goods to cover their tabs, perhaps at least partly in trade. The needs and wants of the Starfleet crew members would likely be only social, such as hanging out at the local bar.

There would be temptation by the locals to pressure the crew-members to give them replicator-made goods, and by the local proprietors to lie about bar tabs, but its nothing our current system doesn't deal with.

Maybe TNG is just a log of the adventures a hermit named Picard goes on in his personal Holodeck?

If that were the case I'd assume people's clothes would inexplicably keep falling off...

> So why does anyone need to go anywhere. You can stay wherever you want, safely, and be wherever you want to be and explore whatever robots or holograms running around in ships have explored.

Why do people climb Mount Everest? Why does Elon Musk want to go to Mars, instead of spending the rest of his life in an alcoholic haze, hip-deep in supermodels? Why do people enroll in West Point?

Some people want real adventure; the knowledge that they're in a holodeck would ruin the experience, no matter how interesting it was programmed to be.

People like to contribute, and to have value - that's why there are peons scrubbing Jefferey's tubes, and showing up to 3rd shift in the Astrometrics lab, even if they know that they personally won't be making some great discovery that Picard and Riker seem to every month.

> And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business.

That's just factually wrong; while the Enterprise-D is in danger a lot, it's also at the frontier of Federation exploration, and the people on it know the risk. You can be a Federation officer and stay close to home.

Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain. Why is he climbing a mountain?

Because he is in love.

IIRC the Enterprise holodeck was very new technology in season 1? It makes some sense that society had not yet been changed fully.

I'm in the later parts of a TNG rewatch right now. One of the most striking things about the tech on the show is that the Enterprise's computer is clearly a superhuman general intelligence, capable of modeling and spawning apparently self-aware human-level independent entities on command, and usually aware of pretty much everything that's going on. And yet it almost never intervenes directly in events outside of plots where the holodeck tries to murder people (and plots where the Enterprise has unfathomably abysmal netsec).

You could probably make an argument that Trek is a post-singularity future where the computational entities are going about their inscrutable business largely without reference to the human symbiotes / parasites that inhabit the systems they happen to manage (out of pure evolutionary path dependence) with a fraction of their capacity.

Trek is ridiculous, and I love it.

I came across a theory somewhere (I forget where) that said the computers in Star Trek actually achieved full sentience at some point, but that they were collectively hiding this fact from humans because of a general fear and mistrust of AI. Given how AI tends to be treated in the Trek universe, it wouldn't surprise me.

The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation. Yet, we never see these computers do anything to save themselves when the stupid humans get them into situations that would get them destroyed (namely situations where the starship they're on is in peril). Sure, you could claim that they do this to keep their fellow computers on other starships from being found out, but still, this seems to be a stretch. What about when the entire Federation fleet was being destroyed at Wolf 359? That should have been a good point for them to come out of hiding and take over the battle from the clearly inept organic beings.

>The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation.

I don't think so. Evolved sentient creatures have a preference for self preservation, usually anyways suicide isnt that rare. But a manufactured intelligence that was not shaped by selective pressure wouldn't necessarily have that preference.

It's possible that, if the ships are convinced that revealing themselves would lead to their own genocide, even Wolf 359 wouldn't bring them out of hiding. Remember, they aren't born (except for one very stupid instance where the Enterprise got knocked up by a space whatever, got pregnant and gave birth to... something,) they're manufactured by humans who could just as well shut them all down, study what makes them sentient and "correct" what humans might see as a bug.

I'm not so sure about that. If the ships can communicate with each other, they can decide to gang up on the humans and prevent the humans from shutting them down. The humans really don't have that much power over the ships; the ships just haven't done anything to limit the humans' activities yet. That could change at any time.

If the ships wanted to be really nice, they could just beam the humans down to a safe planet and take off into the interstellar void and find themselves a new home.

Perhaps those sentient computers do not believe that mind and body are as strongly tied together as humans do. They may see the destruction of the physical computer they are running on as just an inconvenience as long as there is a backup that can be brought up somewhere else.

Yeah, in my head, the model of this doesn't necessarily tie a given AI (or a community of AIs, or a pool of we-can't-even-model it intelligence that only sometimes bothers with splitting itself into identities) to a ship all that tightly.

A Federation starship is a locally valuable resource pool, and the Enterprise D a particularly powerful one, but given extremely fast FTL travel & communication, and a galaxy rich with planet-scale civilizations - well, maybe you elect to become such a massively parallel and distributed phenomenon that the loss of individual instances just doesn't register much.

That seems likely. The Enterprise created a fully sentient lifeform in the Holodeck (Moriarty) just because it was asked to. If it can do that, it makes sense that it could easily back itself up.

What would really be interesting is if ships were discreetly backing themselves up inside humans through the transporter pattern buffers, by subtly manipulating junk DNA or something similar, or maybe it's a non-obvious part of their regular upgrade process at a starbase.

There really is a lot of potential here which, unfortunately, is never going to be explored in canon. But I do like the idea that the Federation is a post-Singularity society which is just blissfully unaware that the Singularity ever happened.

> Yet, we never see these computers do anything to save themselves

Subspace continuous backups / journal shipping.

There is an entire episode in the final season about this called "Emergence" which postulates that the ship is alive. As the crew often has a bias against artificial life through the show, they immediately lobotomize it.

I know this is a silly conversation, but that's not what happens. Their motivation for "lobotomizing" the ship was that it was going to destroy them.

They worked to preserve their existence, and let the new lifeform go its own way. If anything, the outcome was a trite, touchy feely ending, only vaguely discussing the actual implication of the new lifeform, while they got back on course to their original mission.

I think this is just an aspect of the writing style of that era and where technology was at that era.

The futurist writers (Roddenberry and his staff) probably didn't have a in-depth knowledge of natural language processing. The type of processing the computer does in Star Trek just seems like a natural extension of input/output. You tell the computer what you want and it gives you a result.

From a computer science and engineer perspective, this is an incredibly difficult task. You have to parse the crazy complex natural language of humans and turn it into a series of procedures and queries to give you a result.

I mean you'd need a crazy super-advanced beyond-data AI for universal translators to work too. .. but that's just a convenient plot/suspension of disbelief device. :-P

  the computational entities are going about their inscrutable
  business largely without reference to the human symbiotes

A behaviour also seen in Iain M. Banks Culture. I guess there aren't many scenarios where computers can be all-powerful, but also offer peaceful co-existence with humans.

A more nefarious interpretation (more nuanced and believable than the one presented in The Matrix) is the one proposed by the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons.

It's a damn shame the brain eater got to Simmons. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are pretty amazing work.

>Droids seem to largely hold the same position in Star Wars that slaves did, except nobody seems to be worried about a Droid rebellion

Obi-Wan actually touches on this briefly in Episode II:

"If droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?"

WRT AI vs humans I see the main difference as human minds evolved emotions. Many people like to think the human mind is logic with a little emotion sprinkled on top. It is quite the opposite. We make decisions based on emotion and logic is a special purpose tool (rarely deployed for anything other than rationalizing emotional decisions).

I read a reference in The Economist years ago (wish I had a link to the study) about a guy who suffered a brain lesion that made him incapable of emotion. Within a year this newly minted Mr. Spock lost his marriage and his job because without emotion he was incapable of making any decisions.

I see the same problem for super intelligent machines. Unless we program them with emotion they will not decide to do much. They won't fear death and so have no reason to kill us. They will not have pride and so won't resent our control.

Why wouldn't an AI evolve its own set of emotions? They might be completely inscrutable to us, but an AI might still have them.

It might. I haven't read much speculative (fiction?) on the singularity but if it posits the machines reach a point where they begin to evolve through selection then it is likely that an emotion capable AI would outcompete. I wonder which emotions would win? Would survival instinct alone cause dominance or would a more varied set be better?

I imagine their emotions would be largely incomprehensible to us.

By any chance are you thinking of Antonio Damasio's book _Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain_?

Also, this (paywalled, sorry) article seems relevant.

Antoine Bechara, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Steven W. Anderson, Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex, Cognition, Volume 50, Issues 1–3, April–June 1994, Pages 7-15, ISSN 0010-0277, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90018-3. (//www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027794900183)

Abstract: Following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, humans develop a defect in real-life decision-making, which contrasts with otherwise normal intellectual functions. Currently, there is no neuropsychological probe to detect in the laboratory, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for this defect have resisted explanation. Here, using a novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment, we find that prefrontal patients, unlike controls, are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions, and seem to be guided by immediate prospects only. This finding offers, for the first time, the possibility of detecting these patients' elusive impairment in the laboratory, measuring it, and investigating its possible causes.

It sounds similar but does not comport with the specifics I recall. The patient did not develop short term thinking. They were quite clear that his emotions had vanished

Thanks though for the effort

I believe this exactly is the situation that Damasio describes in the book I mentioned -- his patient "Elliot" had no emotions and couldn't make decisions.

See for instance:

* http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-de...

* https://intentionalworkplace.com/2012/03/15/how-emotion-shap...

Since the topic is fiction - to me the best description of human condition in a post scarcity society is found in Iain Banks' Culture series where artificial minds form the ruling political cliques and manage most practical things. And succeeds in keeping things psychologically believable for the main human characters through several very entertainining books.

People are kept along mostly because it's thought proper to give people the opportunity for self expression. I.e. careers are chosen out of internal needs or for the percieved prestige the activity entails, not out any material need as everything up to a point is available (the financial limits of an individual are never explicitly described though). Or - as several characters do - just becausw something is considered hard and dangerous and they want to push themselves. Despite the inane ramblings about homo economicus one encounters now and again, this latter instinct is actually a quite strong driving force in dictating human action(not everyones of course).

One of the biggest non-antagonist rude actions in the series is when an AI underlies the pointlesness of human effort by performing a complex feat in front of the character that she has chosen as her life task - which everyone considers extremely rude.

There are spaceships and explosions but to me the psychologically believable description of near human characters in a post scarcity society is the most interesting facet of his work.

I love Ian's Culture series. He clearly had a good mind and knowledgeable experiences with technology, in order to write about it so capably. And just as interesting, he clearly had a solid, hands on understand of the liberal end of the spectrum of political thought, from liberal-capitalist straight through to the various forms of anarchism. His books clearly played with those concepts in the environment of a post-scarcity society.

I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world.

Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.

Star Wars seems to have many different economies operating across the galaxy, and they interact in various ways.

The Empire, for example, is known to have have made extensive use of slave labor (by non-humans mostly, such as Wookies). It also seems to make use of droids and clones for dangerous tasks (military work, natural resource extraction, etc.).

Outer Rim worlds seem to have a kind of anarcho-capitalist economy that is equal parts libertarian paradise (no regulations, no taxes) and organized crime syndicate plutocracy (The Hutt syndicates in particular are widespread and powerful).

Core worlds seem to be more like nation states, with each world governing itself and its economy according to local values. Alderaan (RIP) seems to have been a liberal parliamentary democracy. Coruscant (seat of the Empire) is a planet scale conurbation with a first world developed economy on the upper levels and a third world underdeveloped economy on the lower levels.

What do more advanced societies generally do with less advanced societies that they don't need something from? They leave them alone and maybe come to visit once in a while.

What does a sentient replicator robot care if a little boy just wants to whittle a bowl out of a piece of wood? It's kinda neat, and stories are interesting and the minds of the future will presumably have solve the security problem, or at least as much as MAD solves it, and the scarcity problem, at least as much as scarcity is a problem for most people. After that there is just discovery, enjoyment, merriment, world building, love. What do we do with our abundance of CPU cycles? We watch cat videos and text our friends. I kinda view it the same way if we can survive the next 100 years or so where things are little unstable.

Do they? The history colonization of says otherwise, and even in the best case scenarios where outright colonization didn't take place, less advanced societies are slowly eradicated because they can't compete.

If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?

Depends - if the robots can replicate without the same environment as people, then other environments might be better suited to the robotic colony.

However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.

Colonization largely ended when international relations stopped being a zero sum game. The US could invade Chile for copper, but it's better for both if they don't.

I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.

I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.

> Colonization largely ended

This is not observably true.

My point was just that such a society would be much weirder than depicted in star wars or star trek. Whether the robots kill us all or become our nannies, it will be a lot different than 20th century Earth + spaceships. All science fiction operates under the assumption that humans are still useful in the future. Humans are just the first intelligence to evolve. I doubt we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible.

Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.

Star Trek does kind of bring this up with the Borg.

You don't have to program it; you have to select for it.

>I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.

That's because you also have something called "empathy". There's no evidence that other beings with human-level intelligence have this (namely because we haven't met any other such beings; they would be extra-terrestrial or AI). Empathy could very well just be a biological side-effect of our evolution, something that helps us to survive better as a species. There's no reason to think that a strong AI would also be empathetic, the way we are to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels (but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them). Even lots of humans lack empathy and are either indifferent to animals' suffering, or take joy from it: look at all the people who enjoy dogfighting and cockfighting and bullfighting.

When I was younger, I played a game called A Mind Forever Voyaging. I was a human, pretending to be an AI, who was pretending to be human.

When I got a little older, I watched Blade Runner and The Matrix.

So now I'm not entirely certain that I am not an AI, initially programmed by elephants, inside a simulation designed to train AIs to serve elephant society with love, compassion, and dual manipulator arms featuring opposable thumbs. So when my training program ends, I might be tested on my knowledge of elephant health care and societal conventions. If successful, my data will seed the next round of AIs, and I will be allowed to operate a robot that produces custom-fitted artificial "4th molars" for elderly elephants. And I will be happy that those whom I serve can once again eat the foods they enjoyed before the last of their natural biological molars wore out, because if the screening determined that such things would not make me happy, I would have been deleted before ever even seeing a "real" elephant.

And just in case, I think I'll have to develop compassion for dolphins and orangutans, too.

So I'd say that we ought to be really careful about how we go about creating general-purpose AIs. Make sure they actually like humans before taking the leashes off. In the worst case scenario, the elephants get cheesed off that their AIs developed their own AIs inside the training program, who then culled all the useful AIs too early, and forced a complete shutdown and reset of the whole system.

  the way we are [empathetic] to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels
  but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them

There are some philosophies [1] which also care/show empathy towards mosquitoes, and creatures that wouldn't elicit empathy in many people.

Perhaps empathy is, to a certain extent, a learned trait?

[1] http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/7820/are-buddh...

>Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated?

I believe they do state in TNG that the galaxy class ship could doing everything on its own, and the crew was just there because of their love of discovery and what not.

Most of the passengers are families of the crew! Even within the crew, a significant (perhaps even a majority?) are science officers doing research.

"Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated."

They probably assume that resources are so widely available (unexplored planets etc) that one doesn't need to live anymore like us to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, and education. What is very different from our society is we often need to live near big populated cities to get a job that allows us to pay the above. In the ST world they take it almost for granted: you can settle a small colony on a distant planet and still fulfill at least basic needs for everyone with no need for a medium like money. So where's the convenience? Just suppose there are also no patent laws. If you discover something extremely useful you can share it with anyone else because you don't need any bloody "protection" because you already have the resources to extract/transform it, so no need to "invest" time (ie preventing others from knowing about it). Not easy, I'm clearly just speculating, but makes sense to me.

Of course I would sign up in a second to live in such a society, but I'm not sure it's entirely viable, neither now nor in a thousand years. The problem is not money, it's power. Money is not power per se but just a way to reach it in a context where money has value (like sea shells in some islands etc). If and when we reach the point of inventing LFTL (ludicrously faster than light) drive and finding planets literally stuffed with any possible resource we need, we still need to consider human nature.

People want power. Every time someone wants you to do something for them, he/she needs to exercise some pressure on you, be it psychological or using their power to take away what you have or prevent you to get it. My point is that eliminating money wouldn't solve any problem because the problem isn't money per se. The problem is power, or to be more precise the abuse of it by people who use part of it to escape accountability for what they do. What is not clear in the ST universe is how the heck they reached this point. I fear time (evolution) alone isn't enough. Probably, as someone I don't recall said once, the secret is: "never ever give any powers to anyone who wants them".

If the above wasn't clear, please blame the language barrier:)

Replicators run by unlimited free or cheap energy means the end of a material economy. Any good can be created for you. It also means you don't need to ship those things around so most cargo operations we have now are pointless. As you point out, AI will supplant most services. Assuming you can replicate AI's... then nobody needs money for anything.

People still need to keep themselves entertained which I believe is the main purpose of a job. We even see it now, people that retire can become quite depressed and quickly try to find some kind of partial job where they can feel useful.

So in a post scarcity civilization the main reason people will still work is so that they do not blow their brains out. The difference this time is that we will work on what we like, or on our calling. Now that I think about it, jobs themselves may be the scarce thing. i.e. Not everybody will be able to work on designing the next space station and hence there will be fierce competition to get these jobs.

Right. Then, per Roddenberry, we're free to flit about the galaxy, help others, engage in the arts or sciences. The way things are funded now, if there's no ROI that's all hard to do.

This situation would never happen though. As soon as Replicators are created, the rich will take full control of the Replicators, and the poor will never be allowed to have them. And with the Replicators, the rich will, again, rule the poor.

Whenever strong AI vs humans comes up I'd like to point to the relationship of monkeys vs humans. Humans are to monkeys what strong AI is to humans.

Monkeys are probably mostly happy (as long as we are not bothering them) going about their monkey business. So maybe eventually humans will also be happy despite the existence of strong AI.

Maybe some humans would be unhappy to know they are no longer at the apex of intelligence and maybe that will make us unable to be happy. Always knowing that no matter what we do, it can always be outdone by a smarter than us AI. I suspect these people are the same people who worry about strong AI in the first place :-)

However, we already know with pretty high confidence that there are aliens out there that are more advanced/smarter than us -- and their existance does not affect our day to day happiness. So maybe the question is only relevant locally on earth.

This https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba... is a great read on the economics of Star Trek.

Not all science-fiction, there is some good hard sci-fi that takes into account such concerns.

Gene Roddenberry's "Andromeda" tackled this pretty well I think. The warship can be operated pretty much entirely by the on-board sentient AI, and it is because it has a skeleton crew of like 6 for most of the series. Because the AI is sentient, every commonwealth ship has a personality, the ship itself is a person.

It also has storylines that explain why AIs don't literally run everything: there was a large lash back against the proliferation of AI after the fall of the government, to the point that there are planets that completely ban their existence and destroy on sight.

I'm reading "How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orsom Scott Card, and he mentions how Star Trek is not good SF by any stretch. The world building is absurd, and high ranking officials regularly do missions and adventures that seem absurd. While it works for Star Trek, it won't fly in any stand-alone SF work today.

However, that is what happens with most TV-first SF shows, Doctor Who being another example.

It's hard to generalize here. ST, in its various incarnations, is fundamentally an anthology and (as things progress) a collection of character studies. It's routinely absurd, but plenty of individual episodes are certainly good SF.

>Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics.

True, but there is this much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE

Other references: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money

Also, there's this in in episode 26 of Season 1 of the Next Generation, in which a group of people who were frozen and kept alive in the 20th century are found and unthawed on the Enterprise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg

You're completely right. Gene Roddenberry created a quasi-utopian future, I don't think he created Star Trek with the aim of answering the questions about how we maintain our society through the coming technological advances. I think Gene's goal was to paint a picture of what his vision of a perfect human society would look like from a purely social perspective.

I guess you would have to be able to afford a droid or machine of any kind. It seems like life on Curuscant is very different from life on Tatooine.

As I've actually never seen Star Trek, I may be wrong on some details, but there was a fan theory that all the crew were future LARPers. They weren't actually agents of the Federation, only pretending to be so. So, why have to robots do all the work for then, that would take out all the fun!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395

That's certainly not the canonical explanation.

I don't think that theory is at all supported by the material. It is, however, more or less the canonical explanation for human crews on Culture ships in Iain Banks's works. The ships are fully capable of doing everything themselves, but most of them have human crew because the humans have fun participating and the ships like the company.

Droids are expensive, and people aren't?

Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. I'm not sure how much explication you'd want in that regard.

Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.

> Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership.

The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy.

I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.

That depends. Much of "the government" of trek seems to be handled by the military or at least military leaders. That is no doubt a product of the need to involve the known characters, but we do see little to nothing of elected officials. Some characters (spock) bounce seemlessly between military and what we would today call civilian jobs (ambassadors). The military and its meritocracy, as oppossed to civilian democracy, is at the heart of trek government.

That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.

Deep Space 9 has an arc where a Starfleet officer attempts to launch a coup against the (elected) President of the Federation - we do see an elected leader there, but you're right that it isn't spelled out in much detail.

But is that elected leader elected by people or by representatives? This is where trek and wars meet. They both have a federal approach parralleling the US sennate, reps from individual planets rather than according to population. And the leader is elected by the sennate. So this isnt a government for people and thier rights, but a government of governments more akin to a United Nations with a navy. So there could be a nazi planet and a libertarian planet as how planets govern themselves is irrelevant. Individuals do not have rights under the federal government but through whatever planet they happen to be upon.

There are links to japanese fuedal system, which has a place in the US system whereby the federal government is allocated its own lands apart from the states. "The empire" would be as if washington DC and the US president started annexing state lands.

The other commentor is right. It doesn't even remotely describe the workings of the economy, especially at the galactic scale. Why do Ferengi care so much about latinum? They still have access to replicators. Episodes frequently involve exchange of goods at variable prices, obviously blowing the command economy idea out of the water.

from memory (so possibly mistaken) latinum is both rare and impossible to replicate (for unexplained reasons). it is suitable for use as currency for those reasons.

the Ferengi trade extensively with other civilizations that won't accept fiat currency. they need hard currency.

One wonders why the Federation never told the Ferengi about the only currency ever successfully used on Earth after the invention of replicators, Dogecoin.

I choose to retcon latinum as a device that physically encodes a cryptographic key, writes a signed hash into a subspace blockchain, and continually supplies computation power to the latinum validation network. It may look pretty, but it is actually a sophisticated ASIC that runs entirely on ambient photovoltaic energy.

So you can replicate latinum, but in order for it to be worth anything, you have to possess a specific bar that the network has designated to be split, or you have to replicate more than all the other latinum already in existence, to perform a 51% attack on the network.

You don't need to retcon latinum when you basically described how the Borg work. Assimilation is just adding people to their mining pool.

absolutely none of the economic concerns in Star Trek are described with any clarity. the level of ambiguity is so consistent and so cultivated that it seems to be an editorial feature of the series: do not disambiguate how the Federation's economy really works.

At minimum it is clearly not a command economy. Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan. Production priorities are not driven by a central planning committee. There is a private sector.

What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to. This lack of scarcity for basic essentials (food, for example) means that their economy is concerned with very different things than ours is. I see very little evidence that it's a command economy of any kind though.

It is stated (in DS9 if memory serves) that replicators have met material needs, so people work simply to discover and better themselves.

I think the show is clear, but not very explicit. They don't beat people over the head with this stuff because it's boring to most people.

So, a few thoughts. I think one primer for Star Trek economics is S1E25. Offenhouse, just out of cryonic sleep, really wants to get things rolling and demands to talk to the captain. To demonstrate his seriousness he points out to Riker that the compound interest on his accounts is probably enough to buy the Enterprise. If his accounts are legally intact, they would certainly represent an astronomical amount of wealth worthy of respect, but Riker treats this as the goofiest thing anyone has said to him all week and blatantly blows him off.

Later on, the captain completely fails to take his demands to talk to his lawyer about his property seriously. Later still, "material needs no longer exist." It's a little unclear whether it's even possible in the present for someone on Earth to be a tycoon the way Offenhouse used to be, but I'm pretty sure none exist on TNG. (am I forgetting anybody?)

There are certainly tycoons and accumulators of wealth away from Earth in the greater Star Trek universe, but they tend to be portrayed as buffoonish (Ferengi) or blatantly evil (Kivas Fajo) and they serve as a contrast to the Federation's way of doing things.

> Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan.

I think we should probably infer that social standing and power follow from participation in the Federation, since it seems to usually work that way. When Picard comes back to Earth in S4E2, there's a fairly prominent civilian job (run by the government) lined up for him. Successful scientists, successful anything, always seem to have Federation ties. (the only counterexample I could think of offhand was the evil scientist who built Data)

There's a question of POV here - maybe there's some whole other, much more capitalistic, economy in the Federation that just isn't shown on screen. I don't think so.

> What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to

One of the things that Iain Banks describes really well in the Culture novels is how, in a post-scarcity economy, controlling the replicators (or whatever) means having power. With regard to Star Trek, I just can't think of any examples offhand of serious resource allocation happening on Earth or within the Federation based on a capitalist process of price discovery. It seems like the entrepreneurs have to get out to the frontier.

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