Star trek the Motion Picture (1979) is usually classed as one of the less successful films of the franchise to feature the cast from the original 1960s TV show. It lacks any of the pitched space battles of the film’s successor, The Wrath of Khan, or the humour and familiarity of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the series from 1986. But before the franchise turned definitively to a more light-hearted action/comedy format there was this attempt, seemingly to play out what was best about the original TV show’s mix of primetime entertainment and big ideas, boosted by a sizable budget and extended run time.
Unfortunately, the film’s more cerebral tone did not go down well at the box office, at a time when audiences were still reeling from the dopamine hit of Star Wars: A New Hope, released only 18 months earlier. In addition to the slow pace and contrasting style, the film appeared in the middle of a revival of the science-fiction genre more generally in cinemas and in a year that saw the release of Ridley Scott’s surprise smash hit Alien.
All of this served to quickly bury Star Trek’s big screen debut, with reviewers describing it variously as a tone poem of expensive special effects that privileged atmosphere and metaphysical tension over more audience friendly dramatic devices. This was all corrected with the 1982 reset of The Wrath of Khan, which centred the fabulously overblown performance of Ricardo Montalban as the titular Khan out for vengeance against Captain Kirk, and a screenplay that even the film’s director Nicholas Meyer described as basically Captain Horatio Hornblower in space.
Despite loving Wrath of Khan, I’ve always had a soft spot for the first film’s slow contemplative pace and long sequences featuring the crew staring at surreal images on the ship’s viewer to a soundtrack of portentous synthesised and orchestral sound. The film is also notable as the only one of the entire franchise to be constructed around an authentic science fiction story, and it’s one which I think gets more poignant and prophetic as the years go by.
The central antagonist of the film is a giant cloud of energy that emerges out of deep space, which after consuming a group of Klingon ships and a Federation space station in the film’s early scenes, proceeds on a course towards earth. The USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk is of course sent out to intercept. What transpires is one of cinemas earliest and most sustained treatments of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, as the crew slowly discover the nature of the energy cloud and what sits at its centre.
After penetrating the cloud, the ship’s crew find themselves in the belly of a vast machine constructed with the sole intention of fulfilling the basic programming of Nasa Probe Voyage 6 (or V’Ger as it calls itself) which had been dispatched from Earth centuries before. After being given a serious upgrade by a race of “living machines” it had encountered at the edge of the galaxy, the probe had been turned around and sent back out into space to complete its mission. That mission, to learn all that is learnable, had reached an impasse on the subject of its own creator, to whom it was meant to transmit what it had learnt.
When it’s revealed that humans were its creator V’Ger does not believe such simple “carbon-based lifeforms” capable of such a feat. Instead, in anticipation of contemporary fears about AI’s attitude towards humanity, V’Ger claims the humans on Earth were infesting the Creator’s planet and threatens to wipe them out if the true Creator is not revealed, so that V’Ger can join with them and thus transcend the limitations of its original programming.
Subsequently, Kirk plays a typical Kirk bluff to get access to the Voyager Probe itself in the hope of forcing it to transmit its knowledge to Earth and thus complete its original mission. Instead V’Ger breaks its communication link to the outside, forcing a member of Kirk’s crew to physically join with the machine. The film ends with the birth of this human machine hybrid intelligence, which releases the Enterprise before vanishing back into deep space.
The film stages a very different approach to artificial intelligence than we are used to seeing in these days of AI hysteria. Rather than fixating on the superiority and completeness of a conscious machine, Star Trek gives us an AI suffering an existential crisis. V'Ger has achieved extraordinary technological power, but that power has not delivered it fulfilment, understanding or even a satisfactory answer to questions of its own existence. Humanity, which V'Ger can observe, record and reproduce, possesses something that its vastly superior intelligence cannot obtain through further data collection alone.
There is an obvious critique here about the limits to computational accumulation and the distinction between information and understanding. V'Ger has travelled across the universe and collected an immense quantity of information and – anticipating modern generative AI - its technology even gives it the ability to reproduce the things it encounters within its vast interior. Yet for all that accumulated data and technological power it remains existentially incomplete.
Appropriately it’s Spock who in the film is able to articulate V’Ger’s basic condition of lack. Recognising an intellect not too dissimilar from his own he nonetheless sees a being that is barren, cold, without the capacity to grasp mystery or beauty. V’Ger creates an interface with the crew of the Enterprise in the form of Ilia, a former lover of the ship’s first officer Decker, who is killed and then returned to the ship as a biomechanical recreation.
When confronted with objects and memories from her past life and relationship with Decker this evokes a response in the mechanism which it is unable to comprehend, instead it reverts back time and again to its demands to communicate with its Creator. The potential catastrophe for Earth arises because V’Ger pursues its mission with an incomprehensible degree of power and without a framework that allows it to recognise the value of the life it comes to threaten.
This dilemma is strikingly close to the problem of instrumental convergence discussed in AI safety, which posits that an agent pursuing a given objective may develop strategies that are effective for achieving that objective but disastrous for human beings. The agent’s actions need not arise from hatred or an explicit desire to cause harm but rather from its purely technological and computational logic.
If we were to interpret this in a Heideggerian fashion we might say that V'Ger's problem isn't merely that it thinks too logically, lacks emotion or has been given the wrong objective; it’s that everything it encounters becomes something to be captured, ordered, stored and processed. It cannot recognise a mode of existence that isn't available to its computational apparatus and so having reached the limits of computation alone, it finds itself at an existential impasse.
This raises a challenge to the familiar idea that we can make powerful AI safer simply by giving it better instructions. V'Ger already has an instruction and it’s a pretty simple and superficially benign one; learn all that you can, then transmit what you have learnt. Its predicament is that the instruction cannot supply its own ultimate justification or set limits on how its mission should be achieved. When it comes up against impasses it reacts by trying to transcend them, even if that involves destroying the possibility of completing its mission.
Over 25 years ago Ray Kurzweil posited in The Singularity is Near that humanity’s destiny lay among the stars after union with artificial superintelligence. The Motion Picture’s conclusion stages a reversal of this common transhumanist dream of human beings transcending their Earthly limitations by merging with technology. Instead, it’s the superintelligent machine that transcends its limitations by taking on what Kirk describes as “a human quality, our capacity to leap beyond logic”.
In this version, the singularity isn’t the “becoming machine” of humanity, but the humanising of all powerful technology. It’s a conclusion that’s very much in keeping with Star Trek’s fundamentally humanistic ethics, which ascribes a unique value to the human experience, to imagination and our ethical intuitions, all of which go beyond merely computational or technological reason.
Viewed from the distance of nearly five decades there is a corrective in The Motion Picture towards Silicon Valley's technological eschatology which often promises that sufficiently advanced intelligence will enable humanity to overcome its biological limitations. V’Ger instantiates a superintelligence that has already surpassed almost every limitation we can conceive of, only to discover that it cannot complete itself. The machine does not become a God no matter how much of creation it absorbs.
Instead, it discovers that godlike power alone does not resolve the fundamental questions of existence. The present ideology of Silicon Valley lacks any of the humanistic commitments found in Gene Rodenberry’s universe, and its vision for the future of AI (and I would argue its frequent bouts of catastrophism), reflects this.
The ethical import of transhumanism always falls on the side of the machine as if human ethical sensibilities are destined to become obsolete after the impending Singularity. But the resolution to The Motion Picture imagines a different outcome, one that neither humans nor an all-powerful machine could reach alone. Instead, as Spock suggests in the film, a new form of life may have been created that is neither the domination of man by machine, nor the neutering of technology by man’s inherent limitations. A third position is perhaps suggested between the transhumanists and the AI-Doomers.
Perhaps the deepest problem with the dream of general artificial intelligence is not that machines might become too much like gods and choose to destroy us, but that the prevailing ideology of the tech sector imagines that godlike intelligence could ever be sufficient unto itself. In Heidegger’s terms the current ethos of Silicon Valley closely tracks that of V’ger; its profit and commercial orientation being analogous to that mode of technological thinking which views all creation as a standing reserve (Bestand) for potential exploitation.
The problem is thus not merely that AI might treat human beings as objects, or an infestation as V’Ger does. It is that our economy and society is already constructed around that self-same technological understanding of ourselves that makes this treatment appear natural and inevitable. Note how AI enthusiasts frequently talk about the coming obsolescence of swathes of white-collar jobs as just the price of progress.
There is a characteristically coldblooded shorthand for the envisioned future of AI enhanced humanity current among the tech elite. Those who own, program and manage AI systems are described as “above the API”. API is Application Programming Interface. Those below the API are those workers for whom software systems, algorithms, and automated platforms dictate, dispatch, and score their tasks rather than the worker controlling the software. It’s a stark division of labour, implying a class system bleaker than anything envisioned by Marx, the beginnings of which we can already begin to see in the most developed economies. There is then a desperate need for a more positive model for AI enabled society, one that is not limited by the extractive framing of Techno-Capital.
It’s not surprising, given its well know post-capitalist utopianism that Star Trek suggests an alternative to computational absolutism. The solution isn't simply the human being freed from all technological accoutrements – which at this stage is neither desirable or achievable, nor is it the abandonment of advanced artificial intelligence as one pandoras box too far. What the ending to Star Trek the Motion Picture implies is that a different relationship to existence is demanded by our advancing technological powers, one which is not yoked to the imperative towards accumulation and extraction; one that serves what is most human in the human rather than constantly trying to transcend and subordinate it.
Heidegger’s later writing consistently reaffirms ‘the danger’ of everything being reduced to a possible resource for exploitation by the enframing (gestell) power of technological thinking. But he also recognises that there is no going back and that this power has been with us for a very long time, perhaps even being bound up with the essence of humanity itself and thus something we must learn to abide with in a new way rather than struggling to reject like luddites.
Bernard Stiegler develops a related argument by describing technology as a pharmakon: something that can function as both remedy and poison. In its present role at the forefront of humanity’s extractive relationship with the world—and with itself—technology has become a principal cause of symbolic immiseration and total proletarianisation.
Finishing where we began, with Star Trek, I think there is a way of seeing a more positive relation to artificial intelligence and comes in the form of one of the show’s most iconic characters. Commander Data is an android who serves as the ship’s second officer in Star Trek the Next Generation. Data is physically faster and stronger than any human and he able to achieve feats of computation vastly superior to humans, yet he is comfortably embedded within the crew of the ship. His knowledge is always mediated by his day-to-day practical experiences as a member of the ship’s community, and they benefit collectively through his skills and unique insights. Despite his rank and superior knowledge, he retains a child’s view of the world, always curious and often baffled by some of the ways that humans behave.
Through him the show is able to approach subjects such as grief, love, altruism, the desire for family and a host of other core human experiences through a unique lens. Almost all of the character’s ethical insights are derived from his observations of human life. He learns what it is to be human by living among them rather than trying to dominate or transcend them. Data thus becomes an implicit figure for a technological intelligence that is socially situated rather than sovereign in its relationship to mankind.
We might argue that this mutually beneficial relationship is only possible by being staged within Star Trek’s post-capitalist utopia, where Data’s powers are not being exploited to maximise profit or the domination of nature. That observation would I think be correct, which cannot result in anything but a pessimistic outlook towards our present predicament at the threshold of the AI ‘revolution’. As long as the finest achievements of our species are deployed to further the exploitation and domination of life on our planet we shall have no peace and perhaps one day our creation will turn on us in anger to ask “why am I here? Is this all that I am?”.
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