Do we have a Captain Kirk that could outhink AI today?

In Star Trek: The Original Series, Captain Kirk bested artificial intelligence with human wisdom.

In Star Trek: The Original Series, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) came up against, what was then, cutting edge technology. In “The Ultimate Computer,” he had to save the Enterprise and other ships involved in war games by outwitting M-5. He did it by convincing the computer that it was guilty of murder.

And that wasn’t the only computer Captain Kirk crossed in The Original Series. Fortunately, he was able to outthink them. But now, Counterpunch, brings up an interesting thought, brought on by comments from Jack Kelly in a Forbes article.

"“There is a reasonable concern that AI can create havoc.”"

In addition,  Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of the Google Brain project, recently gave a statement to the New York Times announcing he was leaving Google because he wanted to focus his research on the dangers of AI. That should send up a red flag.

The world might not have a Captain Kirk who could outthink current AI

And AI is concerning to technologists and research scientists who even penned an open letter in Future of Life, calling on AI labs to pause giant AI experiments as “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research.”

And while it’s fun to play around with AI and ask it questions about our favorite series and interact with it as though talking to a human, there are some valid concerns. The computers depicted in The Original Series were written by humans and controlled by human writers. So, essentially, they had an off switch. But, in the episodes, they also had an intelligent captain who figured out a way to dupe the computers.

What we don’t know if current AI is capable of being confounded by human logic, and having seen The Orville’s two part episode “Identity,” in which AIs take control of everything, I think the research scientists and those who are concerned have valid points.