15-15 The Doomsday Machine and a Future Askew

Norman Spinrad's original March 1967 story outline for "The Planet Eater" introduced Star Trek to an unstoppable machine roaming the galaxy, consuming planets for fuel and leaving destruction in its wake. By the time it reached television, the story had a new title, "The Doomsday Machine," and became one of the most celebrated episodes of the original series.

Author and filmmaker Jeffrey Morris joins Larry Nemecek at Star Trek Las Vegas to revisit that original outline and consider its warning through a distinctly 21st-century lens. Drawing from his new book, A Future Askew, Jeffrey explores artificial intelligence, social media, technological disruption, and the increasingly complicated distance between the optimistic future Star Trek imagined and the one we're actually building.

Could today's rapidly developing technology become our own version of the Planet Eater: enormously powerful, increasingly autonomous, and ultimately beyond the understanding of its creators? Sixty years after Star Trek began imagining the future, an old-fashioned doomsday machine provides a surprisingly timely place to ask where we're headed next.

Document of the week:

• "The Planet Eater" by Norman Spinrad — Story Outline, March 6, 1967

Additional references:

• Jeffrey Morris — A Future Askew: Urgent Essays Inspired by the 60th Anniversary of Star Trek
• "The Doomsday Machine"
• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares 
• Center for Humane Technology
• The Social Dilemma
• Borg
• V'Ger