An agent from the future is sent back in time to interrupt the U.S. space program before it precipitates planetary destruction but first he must win an argument with a computer. Before a computer will comply with direct commands from a human, he must first prove his identity beyond simple voice recognition. This episode of Star Trek aired nearly 20 years after Alan Turing proposed his test of machine intelligence, foretelling a day when computers will be endowed with communicative and analytical capacity approximating or exceeding that of humans. In this scene, both the human and artificial intelligence agents seem exasperated and impatient to be dealing with one another.

Comment on this page