Yes, though "far" isn't so large as to be inconceivable: the city of Starbase is only 2.75 km from the Starship launch tower.
That kind of distance may or may not be OK for a whole bunch of other reasons, many of which I'm not even qualified to guess at the nature of, but the noise at least isn't an absolute issue for reasonable scale civil infrastructure isolated development in many places.
> That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.
In fairness, half the time the Trek computer does something weird, it only makes sense if there's no memory/process isolation and it's all one uniform blob of compute. Made sense in the 60s where Spock's chess app losing to him was useful evidence that the CCTV recordings had been faked, not so sensible in 2025 when the ship stops being able to navigate due to the excess system demand from the experimental holodeck.
> Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is.
A tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear it: if it makes a "sound", you think "sound" is the vibration of air; if it does not, you think "sound" is the qualia.
"Understanding" likewise.
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology.
1. "Execute self-diagnosis script" doesn't require self-reflection or anything else like that, just following a command. I'd be surprised if any of the big AI labs have failed to create some kind of internal LLM-model-diagnosis script, and I'd be surprised if zero of the staff in each of them has considered making the API to that script reachable from a development version of the model under training. No reason for normal people like thou and I to have access to such scripts.
2. Not that the absence says much. If humans could self-diagnose our minds reliably, we wouldn't need therapists. This is basically "computer, send yourself to the therapist and tell me what the therapist said about you".
> When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
Those computers (and the ships themselves) went wrong on such a regular basis on the shows, that IRL they'd be the butts of more jokes than the Russian navy.
> Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.
This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard).
On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".
>> it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped.
> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.
An S-curve is exactly the opposite of "suddenly" stopping.
It is possible for us to get a sudden stop, due to limiting factors.
For a hypothetical: if Moore's Law had continued until we hit atomic resolution instead of the slowdown as we got close to it, that would have been an example of a sudden stop: can't get transistors smaller than atoms, but yet it would have been possible (with arbitrarily large investments that we didn't have) to halve transistor sizes every 18 months until suddenly we can't.
Now I think about it, the speed of commercial airlines is also an example of a sudden stop: we had to solve sonic booms first before even considering a Concorde replacement.
The privatised water companies chose to stop building additional reservoir capacity. From what I've read, the UK pipes currently leak about the same percentage of the water going through them, as the percentage by which the population went up since privatisation.
It's money and incentives, not a property of the geography.
It may cause corruption, because despite lawmaker's attempts to carve out security*- and governance-critical communications, it's almost impossible for this tech to fail to open doors to blackmailers.
But existing corruption is neither necessary nor sufficient for what we see here. Wrong axis.
EU is (mostly, and relatively speaking) un-corrupt as governments go; more corrupt places (and also authoritarian places) will write fantastic laws that they just straight-up ignore.
* Which won't work anyway: consider that the US military had to issue statements and bans because fitbit was revealing too much about military bases.
State secrets are to governments as private keys are to software engineers, except it's much slower to change meatspace things like (to make up a fictional example) the gaps your military found in their CIWS naval defence system, which if leaked means your enemies now know know how to exploit in order to wipe out your navy.
> Tanks are obsolete weapons - esp in urban areas. They would be taken out by cheap drones. And you are forgetting that for every active US soldier there are ~3x retired and opinionated soldiers. Many of them know tactics to take down armor. And how to train civilians.
Arguing over irrelevant details; all that can be true, and the military can therefore respond not by firing tank shells but by drone strikes, which many of the retired soldiers don't know how to respond to because almost all knowledge of modern drone warfare is in the Russian and Ukranian militaries right now.
In this scenario, if the US civilians were very lucky, the US military have learned nothing from the was Russian and Ukranian forces battle today; likely real scenarios are much messier, internal splits within both military and civilians on Trump/not Trump (different to Dem/Rep) lines, militia with ??? training, criminal gangs taking advantage, reduced international trade (perhaps except for whover supplies drone parts who may prop up both sides at the same time to maximise reveue, perhaps not because that's China and they want factories not rubble piles made out of factories), etc.
That kind of distance may or may not be OK for a whole bunch of other reasons, many of which I'm not even qualified to guess at the nature of, but the noise at least isn't an absolute issue for reasonable scale civil infrastructure isolated development in many places.
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