Star Trek and the Real Future

I recently decided to watch the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture again. As a big fan of sci-fi and the future, I have always enjoyed Star Trek. What really amazes me about this show and many other modern sci-fi TV, is that in its portrayal of the future it totally ignores any potential change in the human mind and therefore in human conduct. What is even more amazing is that this was not actually true of the original Star Trek series. It aired in the 1960, a time of deep social strife when segregation of government-enforced racism were still the norm. And what we saw among the multi-racial crew of the original Starship Enterprise was the total absence of any racial discrimination. The message was clear: In the future such irrational discrmination will not exist. But with later series this character of Star Trek largely disappeared. We saw regular modern people using amazing futuristic technology, but they were still just our normal average Joes. They thought and behaved like we would think of behave in the modern world. In the movie Doctor McCoy makes references to spanking children - something I think will be universally recognized as a type of child abuse within the next few decades. Furthermore, it is easily inferred from the conclusion of the movie that human emotions are something that surpasses and improves on logic. There seems to be a fully accepted premise that the universe can be grasped better using some other sixth sense which has nothing to do with reason and empiricism. In face, Earth is saved by the very existence of human emotions, when the gigantic alien computer which was going to destroy Earth fuses with a human and evolves to become some higher being.
And this is, of course, another symptom of the age-old "fear of machines", which science fiction has been using as an apocalyptic vision scarcely less often than the "fear of alien invasion". Both of these scenarios are highly unrealistic and logically problematic. But let's look at the very nature of man versus machine. People seem to think that machines are some cold and evil things (because they have no emotions and no 'moral standards') which rely purely on mathematics and logic - i.e. a supercomputer is the perfect Benthamite utilitarian. This is not the case, however. Machines are actually made in our image. Human beings use logic and empiricism to get by in their everyday life. All other superstitions are 'emotions' are either reactions to logic and empiricism, or they are ways to explain something that logic cannot yet explain. Machines are kind of like children - they don't create strange explanations to problems they can't solve, they simply ignore those problems as unsolvable. Our computers are not some seperate sort of creation, their programming is based on observations about the real world and it reflects our own brain activity.

All discussions of futuristic scenarions in modern discourse and popular culture are woefully ignorant of the concept of Social Darwinism - the fact that our ideas and knowledge (and therefore conduct) continually evolve towards their best adaptation to our universe. The most powerful aspect of human evolution is the continual shift in our morality and code of conduct. As Herbert Spencer put it: "Evil perpetually tends to disappear." And why is that? Simply because, as common sense dictates and as Spencer rightly observed, "all evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions."