In this scene from "A Taste of Armageddon" a first-season episode of the original Star Trek series (1966–69), a planet is discovered to be engaged in a centuries-long war being fought entirely through computer simulations. The simulations, which are entirely virtual, nonetheless kill hundreds of thousands of people who voluntarily submit to death by dematerialization in order to prevent the cultural devastation of physical warfare. In spite of the tragic consequences of the simulated attacks, the planet's ruler passionately defends their solution to this protracted conflict as preferable to the total physical destruction of the planet that would otherwise result. The humans of this society, in other words, have become extensions of the computer simulations–collateral damage that neatly inverts the absence of physical consequences ordinarily associated with computer games. The computers on Eminiar VII quite literally bring about the deaths of the humans who created them, while suffering no ill consequences themselves.

The machine-like resignation of the Eminarians is condemned even by Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the Vulcan whose life is ruled by logic, although he grudgingly admits to being able to understand the insular coherence of their system. Unbridled by the constraints of either Vulcan or computer logic, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) ultimately destroys the nearby dematerialization chambers as well as the central computer simulators, constituting one of the series' most egregious violations of the Federation's Prime Directive against interfering in the internal development of an alien civilization. Kirk's unapologetic paternalism is nonetheless characteristic of the humanist critique that prevailed in many responses to computation in this era. Kirk's rugged individualism, however, is not enough to align him with a libertarian critique. He is not opposed to technology as such, and indeed is perfectly happy to use it in support of his own hegemonic interests. Kirk's opposition to technology hinges on having human priorities subjugated to those of machines.

In the universe constructed by Star Trek's original series–and the late 1960s technological imaginary it refracts–computers are a "calm technology" as defined by Mark Weiser and John Seeley Brown (1996), a nearly ubiquitous, consistently functioning background technology that only requires human attention when something has gone awry.  But we should also remember that the ship's computer on Star Trek is the very definition of a mainframe–a single computer that is shared by many users. Like the computer simulators on Eminiar VII, the ship's computer does only what it is programmed to do and works as intended most of the time. Any pathological or antisocial behavior it might exhibit on occasion is the fault of the humans who created it.

This is made abundantly clear in the second season episode "The Ultimate Computer" (1968). Airing in early March 1968, less than a month before Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey appeared in theaters, "The Ultimate Computer" offered a deliberate and insistent, humanist critique of computing. Unlike HAL, The ship's "duo-tronic" (i.e., binary) computer on Star Trek was never conceive as an AI and was never even given a name. Even in "The Ultimate Computer," when a newly invented (but still not anthropomorphized) computer, the "M5" is given total control of all ship systems and begins to exhibit erratic and murderous behavior, it turns out the computer's inventor, Dr. Richard Daystrom (William Marshall), encoded the computer with his own (as it turns out) unstable emotional profile. The M5, which represents a next-generation "multi-tronic" computer capable of integrating and maximizing the efficiency of all the ship's systems, threatens to render the starship crew unnecessary. As the episode progresses, the exact set of labor anxieties that arose in Desk Set (1957) reappear as Kirk agonizes over the possibility that this new computer will make his job obsolete. In the end, it is the usual failings of computation that bring about the computer's downfall–a lack of context awareness and human intuition coupled with an overly literal interpretation of its programming–and it is Kirk's distinctly human intuition that saves the day.

In another episode from the second season of Star Trek, "Assignment Earth" (1968), an agent from the future is sent back in time to interrupt the US space program before it precipitates planetary destruction. The human agent brings with him the necessary credentials for controlling the computer, but is met with resistance to his verbal orders. Ultimately, the computer announces with petulant exasperation and a trace of pride, "I am a beta 5 computer capable of analytical decisions."

Although revealing, these episodes, which deal with overt tensions around the role of computers in the Star Trek universe, are ultimately eclipsed by the endless and repetitive verbal sparring between Spock and Doctor McCoy (DeForrest Kelley). McCoy and Spock's continuing antagonism is readily reduced to an ossified polarity of human (McCoy) versus machine logic (Spock), an unnecessarily sharp binary that precludes any but the most oversimplified discourse on the subject. As one of the show's most persistent tropes, the McCoy-Spock binary may be read as both a broad metaphor for the social anxieties caused by the coming age of computation and an illustration of the frequent inability of popular culture to engage them in any but the most superficial way.

Comment on this page