Dave, Emad and Salim pick "The Apple," "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Ultimate Computer"

All right, Dave, over to you.

Yeah, my choice is a season 2 episode called The Apple, which by all accounts is not a great episode for entertainment value, but it was the first one that dealt with this concept that in the future there's advanced AI and entire civilizations can end up asleep at the wheel because the AI is just doing everything for you. And so in this episode, the whole civilization has no idea that the AI is manipulating them.

And they live in this paradise.

It's called The Apple because it's the Garden of Eden. And they're just in this perfect paradise managed by the AI until it goes wrong, and it's so ahead of its time in terms of predicting that potential outcome — which I think Waze has proven, like, we can literally forget how to navigate because of Waze, and that's just a fact now. So I think, you know, Star Trek was at its best when it was actually predicting real futures that nobody else was touching in the media at all. And, you know, as a young person watching these things, you can say, I can totally see how that's going to happen. And so that's my favorite episode, because there were several that dealt with this issue, but that was the first.

Yeah. And as Alex said, you know, the moral elements it dealt with back in the 60s were extraordinary. Um, all right.

Every episode was a morality play, and TNG to some extent as well. It was great. Star Trek lost that. If you've watched — if you've — so I don't care whether this is perceived as dumping on recent Star Trek. I'm the hugest Star Trek fan. Star Trek has lost the original moralizing vision of the original series. If you've seen some of the recent movies or television shows, it's an action show. It needs to go back to basics.

I agree with you there, Alex. You can't really — I know. Um, I suppose Mirror, Mirror from the original series, where they have the alternate universe and Spock in a goatee. Um, goes something goatee. Yeah. Well, sometimes. Um, but yeah, I think it was always interesting to kind of see the flip reverse side of things. As you said, morality is kind of at the core of the original series of Star Trek, and pushing it in various directions. And this one was one of the more obvious ones. It's like, hey, look, it's an evil universe, but at the same time, you know, them not getting dilithium crystals because they use it for war and others. You see the knock-on effects of things like that.

Thank you. Salim, wrap us up here. Uh, for me it was uh season 2, episode 24. It was called uh The Ultimate Computer. And basically they have an AI that goes rogue and starts to automate uh the ship. And the aim is benevolent initially — can we run the ship using an AI or computer, in that framing? And Kirk is worried because it's about to take his job. Uh, but then the thing starts going rogue and making its own decisions, and uh it's incredibly relevant for today's world, right? Because it's this theme of autonomy, automation versus transformation. Um, and here you have this enormous stress of the — they've introduced an AI, but the AI is redoing everything to match its thinking, and this is exactly what we're living through today. So for me, that's the most relevant. I mean, prophetic, 60 years ago.