All my life I've been a big Star Trek fan. In my book, From Star Wars to Superman, I have a chapter on Star Trek, and I go into detail about what I love about it, and what's disappointed me about it more recently.

But I was thinking about how, back in the day, watching shows like The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, they had this amazing thing where they could just talk to the ship's computer. The captain would say, "Computer..." and it would beep an acknowledgement. And then you could ask it a question, like, "How long until we reach the blah-blah nebula?" And the computer would respond with a soothing female voice: "Fourteen hours, and nine minutes." I thought, that would be so cool, to be able to do that.

So now that it's a reality, why do I hate it? There are two big differences between the Star Trek version of Siri or Alexa and the Apple or Amazon or Google versions.

Number 1 - although the writers of Star Trek were amazing futurists who could predict directions technology would go, they were also way too optimistic about human nature and totally failed to factor in original sin and the greed of turning everything into marketing. So they failed to predict that the soothing female voice also has ears, and would be listening to everything you say and do, in order to collect data on you to try to get you to buy things you don't need. So for a more accurate prediction of computers on this point, you need to go beyond Star Trek and check out Brave New World and 1984 - because someone is always listening.

Number 2 - the computer doesn't just do what YOU want it to do, it now makes decisions for you, and does things without asking you. For example, our thermostat runs on an app on our phones, and recently, whatever demonic robot lurks behind that app decided to implement a new "eco-whatever" setting, and just changed all my presets and basically turned off the air conditioning in the middle of the night. Did I ask it to do that? No I did not. So it's a far cry from a computer that makes life easier or more convenient, it's now a computer that attempts to make us its servant (really the servant of the fat cats in the conference room who, every day, ask the question, how can we make more money? - to be clear, there is no such thing as AI, there is only marketing and greed). But anyway, the point is that the way these computers work now, not to mention the way they change how they work on a daily basis, creates new frustrations at an exponential rate.

So now if I were to watch Star Trek, I wouldn't wish for a computer that could do more, I would nostalgically long for one that would do less.