Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I think you have to keep charity in mind on that compliment. It was meant as high praise for the medical achievement of curing someone. Not as reductionism to shining a light and magically curing something. More, that was pretty clear just in the comment.

To that end, I'm curious how Star Trek is a useful iconic yardstick? My assertion would be that it is not. It is a common one. But there is nothing useful in it. Precisely because you have to cherry pick what parts you use and how you interpret them. For example, you interpreted it to refer to the method of curing. The comment was taking it for the level of the sickness that was cured. Both are valid places to look.

View on HN

I'm curious how Star Trek is a useful iconic yardstick?

I suppose it's sentimentality. If you watch TNG (which is difficult nowadays -- it's so far out of time), the writers made some interesting observations.

We now have the capability to ask the computer for information (Google), the ability to send each other messages (email), and we can verbally ask the computer questions (Siri). Touch interface (iPhone). These are landmark achievements, and they were all predicted by a show which ended in 1994, before the advent of the internet. The technology predictions have generally been on-point, and it seems like a useful metric for how far humanity can progress.

It may have more to teach: it was clearly a Post-scarcity society with some form of UBI,etc.

Simultaneously it postulated that the humans of the future would not be cyborgs, which appears unlikely. Furthermore, few tasks were automated in a manner we might see in our lifetime, let alone the time of the show.

Star Trek doesn't so much predict as it does inspire. We keep getting Trekky things in the real world because people want to make Trekky things; there's much work going on right now on tricorders, more directly inspired Trek tech.

> These are landmark achievements, and they were all predicted by a show which ended in 1994, before the advent of the internet.

Umm. I was reading about TNG on the web in 1994. The internet had been around for a long time before the web was useful to ordinary people. Email has been around since the 70s. Search engines were certainly limited, but were already available in the early 90s.

All these predictions succeeded because they were "predicting" incremental improvement on something already known to exist.

I get the sentimentality. But about the only part of the show that I feel resonates in the truly somewhat predictive mode, is how many tablet style interfaces they had. And even then, that is a bit of a stretch.

I'd wager most of the things that you are quoting were less pioneered by Star Trek, and moreso popularized to an audience. In particular, using a computer to find information, talking to a computer, and sending messages electronically have long been staples in science fiction. Before science fiction, the only thing that was different was the "electronically" part. And really, I don't know as even Star Trek was treating "electronically" any different than earlier stories used "magically."

Call it sentimentality, but I don't feel like watching TNG is that difficult nowadays. It's old and missing some of the tech we have today, but if you can suspend your disbelief on that, it stands pretty well.

(To those who haven't watched TNG, the whole series is on Netflix, mostly (entirely?) in the remastered edition, so no TV-like quality. A piece of caution: this is not your typical sci-fi; it's much more positive about the future, science and technology than what we get served on TV these days.)

RE the yardstick thing - there's still lots of things that in Star Trek are shown as easy, and that they feel like they should be easy with sufficiently advanced tech, and that are still hard for us today. So it's maybe less of an yardstick and more of a goal / reminder that there's lots to be done yet.

>before the advent of the internet.

The internet was around well before 1994.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com