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I was thinking the other day: Star Trek computers make a lot of sense if they are working with our current level of AI.

You can talk to it, it can give you back answers that are mostly correct to many questions, but you don't really trust it. You have real people pilot the ship, aim and fire weapons, and anything else important.

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And nobody in Star Trek thinks the ship computer is sentient. On the other hand, the holodeck sometimes malfunctions and some holodeck character (like Moriarty) becomes sentient running on just a subset of the ship computer. That suggests sentience (in the Star Trek universe) is a property of the software architecture, not hardware.

Firstly, they had unlimited energy and replicators - which means they could make whatever hardware they wanted.

And they also had bio-neural circuits. And photonic chips.

So, hardware was already way ahead of software.

All this goes to show that in real world, the actual science (and fiction) around material sciences was already quite advanced compared to software.

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