Before artificial intelligence became a buzzword for a kind of souped-up autocomplete function on your phone, science fiction dealt with questions of self-aware AI within somewhat limited frameworks. This might sound counterintuitive since 20th-century sci-fi is lousy with robots, but the reality is mainstream sci-fi of the past basically only had two modes: Either droids were commonplace enough to be innocuous (Star Wars) or artificial life was dangerous, and often, deadly (2001, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica). While some sci-fi dodged AI by sticking it in a backstory (Dune), the strangest approach to future-tense AI oddly came from the Star Trek franchise in which the basic conceit throughout the canon is that sentient AI is almost always treated as rare. Or, at the very least, within one given episode or film, the audience is convinced of the scarcity of sentient AI because the situation is unique to that story.
Thirty-five years ago, during the week of March 12, 1990, Star Trek: The Next Generation dropped an iconic episode in which the basic conflict revolved around Trek’s unwillingness to imagine omnipresent intelligent robots in large amounts. Today, “The Offspring” remains a brilliant and touching story, but it also created a canon precedent that complicates the franchise to this day. Spoilers ahead.
