Would Roddenberry have given Star Trek robots if he could've?

[Starter Set]

I'm not a huge Star Trek fan so my knowledge here is limited after Deep Space 9

Oh don't worry, nothing really worth talking about after DS9.

[DrNewGod]

No, that means I thought you said Reboot and not Robot.



It was a mistake but I find the whole confusion hilarious. Nothing personal at all.

No worries. If you look at all my misspellings on these forums, it's perfectly reasonable to answer the question either way.

[WebLurker]

This is true, particularly your comment about the times in which the shows were made shaping attitudes within the shows. That said, even TOS was more suspicious of AI (Landru, Nomad, your afore-mentioned Dyson's computer) than automation per se, automated probes mentioned as having done early mapping work. I guess I see a difference between the repair drones in Disc and artifacts with agency like Ruk.

That's fair, although I wonder if drones would've been perceived as AI robots back then or not?

(Still, some things never change; we still tell stories about AI going bad even now when we trust computers. Some of DSC's season two stuff would've been right at home in TOS's thinking computers are a bomb waiting to go off mentality.)

[Scott Taylor]

Roddenberry had many stories in TOS where machines were bad. Whole planets were ruled by them, in not a good way. Androids were always bad news. Lots of times the bad guys conducted their bad guy shenanigans by use of machines. The stories were clearly saying that technology is good as long as we are cautious not to remove the human element entirely.

Also, as far as drone work by robots, Roddenberry believed clearly that in the future everyone would have jobs and those jobs would provide them with meaning in their lives. And that money was not needed anymore. This rules out drone mechanics, because he would have rather had people doing those tasks to provide meaning to their lives. There was no class structure, either, so a laborer would be of equal value to a starship captain. In Roddenberry's view. Clearly it wasn't completely thought out and there were some inconsistencies with that philosophy and how it played out in the episodes.

The upshot is that he wouldn't want drones or robots or anything whose job was to take the place of a human.

[DrNewGod]

Roddenberry had many stories in TOS where machines were bad. Whole planets were ruled by them, in not a good way. Androids were always bad news. Lots of times the bad guys conducted their bad guy shenanigans by use of machines. The stories were clearly saying that technology is good as long as we are cautious not to remove the human element entirely.

Also, as far as drone work by robots, Roddenberry believed clearly that in the future everyone would have jobs and those jobs would provide them with meaning in their lives. And that money was not needed anymore. This rules out drone mechanics, because he would have rather had people doing those tasks to provide meaning to their lives. There was no class structure, either, so a laborer would be of equal value to a starship captain. In Roddenberry's view. Clearly it wasn't completely thought out and there were some inconsistencies with that philosophy and how it played out in the episodes.

The upshot is that he wouldn't want drones or robots or anything whose job was to take the place of a human.

Yes-ish. He definitely presented a future where people's work had meaning, and - especially with TNG - he leaned into the idea of an egalitarian society. However, the messaging was inconsistent sometimes on both points in TOS.

Work definitely got automated in Roddenberry's future (i.e. the automated facility on an otherwise empty planet featured in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"). Yet sometimes, humans were shown doing jobs considered in the show as nasty, like dilithium mining ("Mudd's Women"). However, those miners were out on the fringe, and there may have been differences in life on the Federation's major planets, and their more remote colonies.

TOS was also less definite about society being classless. Those grubby dilithium miners were characterized as being rich, or at least, on their way to being so. There were also times where Starship Captains were mentioned as being elite figures ("Bread and Circuses").

So, in general, I'm with you, but I can see things that make me think Roddenberry wouldn't have been against the idea that technology would have been used to do tasks heavy on drudgery. If anything, the idea that he viewed the future as a place where people's work helped them find meaning would argue in favor of the idea that he might have featured robots if he could have routinely afforded to do so.

[ChrisIII]

I think technically there's always been robots in Trek, but Data and the others like him were able to learn and adapt like a human, while TOS robots such as the Kirby ones, the amusement park planet, Mudd's, Illia etc. seemed to be mostly human minds copied into a robot body (Kirby, the Kirk duplicate, Illia probe, later Data's "mother" I think, also to an extent Picard himself) or very limited in function/programming beyond the basic (The mudd ones, some of the other Kirby robots). Ditto with the ones the Mars ones in Picard (Which were reprogrammed by the Romulans I think and didn't develop any self-awareness/rebellion on their own I think).

[Güicho]

Only if he could have sex with them......

[Pinsir]

Mankind's relationship with machines is one of the central reoccurring themes in TOS, even more so than TNG which had an android cast member. In TOS, there are a couple of societies that governed by machines, including two planets that wage war using algorithms (one of the better ideas in TOS, that's for sure), there is an episode where Kirk is nearly replaced as captain by a robot, there are sexbots and in the first movie, a machine threatens to destroy the Federation (or something, I don't remember much about that film).

[MyriVerse]

Pretty sure Roddenberry wouldn't have had a problem with robots, in particular. He also created Andromeda, after all, which had AIs as an entire race. TBH, it's always been a peeve of mine how the Trek universe treated AIs-- with rare exceptions, like Data, they're always treated as inherently evil.

[DrNewGod]

Pretty sure Roddenberry wouldn't have had a problem with robots, in particular. He also created Andromeda, after all, which had AIs as an entire race. TBH, always been a peeve of mine how the Trek universe treated AIs-- with rare exceptions, like Data, they're always treated as inherently evil.

Roddenberry had as much to do with Andromeda as C.S. Forester had to do with Star Trek. That said, yeah, I think Roddenberry would have given the crew drones, if he could have afforded them, but I agree with others on this thread that he wouldn't have done it unless he could do it in a non-kid-stuff manner.

From Wikipedia:

Andromeda is one of two TV series (to date) alongside Earth: Final Conflict based on concepts Roddenberry had created as early as the 1960s and 1970s; Roddenberry died in 1991, nine years prior to the series premiere. The name Dylan Hunt had previously been used for the hero of two TV pilots Roddenberry had produced in the mid-1970s, Genesis II, and Planet Earth, all of which shared a similar dystopian, post-apocalyptic premises.