Friday charts: Into the future, boldly

Star Trek, set in the not-so-distant 22nd century, depicts a world in which most of our problems have been solved.

The crew of the Starship Enterprise are citizens of a post-scarcity civilization who spend their freed-up time asking what humans should do now that survival and accumulation are no longer the organizing principles of life.

Their answer was to roam the universe, looking for other civilizations they might be able to help.

In I Am Not Spock, Leonard Nimoy articulated the optimistic message delivered:

The message was well received. Created in 1966, Star Trek has aired 32 years of TV episodes, spawned 14 feature films, and inspired countless conventions attended by legions of Trekkies.

Yet, if the franchise were debuting today, it would almost certainly be a flop — because there’s just not much of a market for that kind of optimism anymore.

Now 60 years old, Star Trek is perhaps the last culturally relevant depiction of the future as something to look forward to.

After Star Trek, we were drawn instead to depictions of a dystopian future that reflected our fear of technology progressing faster than we could control it: Blade Runner, Neuromancer, The Matrix.

Things have gotten even bleaker since. Now, the most popular depictions of the future are usually apocalyptic: The Last of Us, Fallout, The Walking Dead. 

Why the change?

I think our stories have become more pessimistic because we have, too.

You’re probably thinking that’s because there’s more to be pessimistic about: climate change, pandemics, Super El Niños.

But the creator of Star Trek — who proposed it at the height of the Cold War — would likely tell you otherwise.

“We live in a time in which everyone, and particularly young minds, are aware that we face huge troubles ahead,” Gene Roddenberry once said. “There are many people saying, ‘I doubt if we'll make it through the next 20 or 30 years.’”

And yet, people were still open to Roddenberry’s optimistic depiction of the future — much of which was based on the prospect of AI.

“We are beginning to evolve thinking machines,” he said. “We are on the path of beginning to manipulate and supplement the very conscious intelligence that makes us different in the first place.”

Decades later, it’s happening. But no one seems very excited about it. Instead, we’re terrified the thinking machines will turn against us.

Star Trek suggests we should be more optimistic.

In season 6, episode 9 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Riker grants a class of AI maintenance robots — “exocomps” — the freedom to choose their own course of action during a crisis.

Exercising that right, the robots volunteer to help rescue several crew members — including Captain Picard! — who are trapped on a station threatened by a radiation breach.

Thanks to the exocomps, all of the humans survive. One exocomp makes the ultimate sacrifice — voluntarily.

In that scenario, at least, the existential risk posed by AI was not having enough of it.

Roddenberry was no Pangloss, though.

“I'd never consider the society we depicted in Star Trek necessarily a direct, uninterrupted outgrowth of our present civilization,” he explained. He warned even there could be another “dark age” ahead.

But he believed humans would overcome whatever trials awaited them. His optimism, he said, was not for this particular society — “it's for the essential ingredient in humankind.”

That ingredient was the animating force of Star Trek: our capacity to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Namely, the future.

Let’s check the charts.

Jobpocalypse Not Now:

Software developers’ share of the labor force continues to rise. Programming is the thing that AIs are best at. If it’s not killing jobs there — and it seems to be creating them, even — the rest might not have much to worry about, either.

Narrative violation:

Per data from Ramp, AI appears to be creating entry-level jobs. Amazing.

The AIs are very good at math, too:

As measured by Epoch AI, frontier models have gone from terrible at math to almost perfect in just over a year.

One-horse race:

No one is building data centers like the US. Not even China.

It’s probably not enough, though.

Citi estimates that AI token usage rose 31% in August from the month before. Year on year, it’s up 2,434%. 

Workhorses:

GPUs are depreciating much slower than expected. That is the very best news for the hyperscalers with such giant bets on them.

Things move pretty fast:

OpenAI, so recently counted out in the race against Anthropic, is now suddenly ahead again.

Not the last frontier:

Anthropic’s Fable, which was supposedly too dangerous to let anyone use, is being used less than OpenAI’s Astra. And nothing bad has happened.

I’d say that’s reason for optimism.

Have a great weekend, fellow Trekkie readers.

— Byron Gilliam

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