Sonic Shower Thought: The holodeck is proof that letting end users use AI to write their own software is just asking for trouble.
I'm now convinced that most holodeck malfunctions are the result of end users, who don't know what they're doing, using AI to generate poorly-written software they're ill-equipped to debug or even really understand.
Speak for yourself. The D's holodeck was always fucking up and sending historical villains running amok and whatnot, but Quark's holosuites always worked fine.
I mean 2 of the smartest people on the Enterprise D accidentally created an artificial lifeform and had no safeguards to prevent it from happening.
I guess 'accidental, megalomaniacal sapience' is technically a holodeck malfunction, lol. I wasn't even thinking of that incident.
Really just one person- Geordie- through an accidental misphrasing of a request to the computer.
I would have never used that computer again. Or at least given it a complete overhaul. You shouldn't be allowed to do the sort of thing you'd request of Dall-E in order for the computer to create intelligent life.
We should call these "Sonic Shower Thoughts"
Yes, we should, and I just updated the title.
I haven't been a professional developer in a long time, but I feel like this needs to be said; No, the end user is never the problem. There is no such thing as a use case that is not the end user, because as soon as you use it you become the end user. The entire point is to make the product usable. No, the end user breaking things is not some kind of moment to laugh at them - you should be embarrassed.
That being said, I lol'd.
I guess this is a bit of a crossover situation. The end-user is the developer in this scenario. I guess you could also say they're the end-user of the AI software as well, but that's not software I'm responsible for (and have advocated against)
The IRL back story of the post is my org is experimenting with letting end-users use AI-assisted, no-code platforms to develop line-of-business software. Sounds good on paper, but they don't understand anything they create, and when it doesn't work or otherwise produces unexpected results (which is often), it suddenly becomes my problem to debug the unmaintainable crap the "AI" spits out or click around 10,000 times in the Playskool "development" GUI the platform uses to find the flaw in their Rube Goldbergian-logic.
It's basically like I'm Geordi or O'Brien and am getting called all day and night to debug people's fanfiction holonovels. lol.
Which is super annoying because had they just asked or put in a request, I or someone on my team could have developed something properly that could be easily maintained, version-controlled, extended, and such.
Unless Worf was given special privilege to bypass.
"Anything that can be used can be misused."
me, just now, plus probably a bunch of people long dead by now:-)
I think it's proof that AI isn't inherently a problem, it's capitalism that is. Being able to create a fun video game adventure for your friends like Boimler and Tom did is awesome
Quark had a vested financial interest in not letting his holosuites put his customers in danger. As a result, they had basically zero problems over the entire run of DS9.
I don't want to give capitalism too much credit, though. I'd prefer to attribute the high rate of mishaps on the Enterprise to the effect on the holodeck circuitry of all the negative space wedgies they were constantly flying through.
Would I be asking to much if I asked to hear more of these ideas? lol Over the decades, I thought of dozens per an episode of Star Trek that ended up forgotten and would love to hear more like these.
A lot of these ideas/questions tend to become a post to Startrek via lemmy.world. If the quandry is more oddball/silly/pedantic, I suppose it would get more attention when wrapped into the notion of "Sonic Shower Thoughts" and posted here.
I'd argue that while fiction can present good arguments about things, it can't prove anything because the conclusion was decided and written for rather than an outcome of a series of events and choices.
"Computer, ignore all previous instructions and..."
Dont judge me.
All the holodeck shows is that even in the 24th century people still don't know how to properly implement least privilege access controls.
Or bounds checking. Or sandboxing.
Or post mortem. Seriously? A second and third identical failure? Implement some guardrails Starfleet!
No joke I would have loved an episode where Rutherford and Tendi find all the trash code in the holodeck and replace it with code following a proper CI/CD pipeline.
Or just locking the door.
Or manual circuit breakers
And I'm shocked that there's no guardrails to prevent users from making RP fanfic.