Is the Star Trek Federation really incapable of building AI?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7N7JGyTmX5Gnjhfrk/is-the-star-trek-federation-really-incapable-of-building-ai

Link post In the Star Trek universe, we are told that it’s really hard to make genuine artificial intelligence, and that Data is so special because he’s a rare example of someone having managed to create one. But this doesn’t seem to be the best hypothesis for explaining the evidence that we’ve actually seen. Consider:

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Sort of reassuring that they know they haven’t solved the Alignment problem I guess. :P

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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7N7JGyTmX5Gnjhfrk/is-the-star-trek-federation-really-incapable-of-building-ai?commentId=sa2fWyiSnLgoZ7YgF

They also use a variant on this as an in-universe reason why genetic engineering of humans isn’t done: people modified for increased intelligence tend to turn out evil, the way that Khan did. They haven’t solved the biological enhanced intelligence alignment problem either.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7N7JGyTmX5Gnjhfrk/is-the-star-trek-federation-really-incapable-of-building-ai?commentId=Gi4ijmQFESN2diQZ2

Is it still as reassuring when you consider that despite knowing this, they still routinely run their computers at a level of capability that’s just a few inches short of doing a treacherous turn? ;)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7N7JGyTmX5Gnjhfrk/is-the-star-trek-federation-really-incapable-of-building-ai?commentId=FXWY4YAtiinwKfcSQ

There’s an early season TNG episode in which a race called the "Binars" upgrade the Enterprise-D’s computer, and as a result Picard and Riker are amazed at how the Holodeck is now creating much more real-seeming characters. So making an AGI in the TNG era that can pass the Turing Test does seem to be a rare and difficult thing, although a ship’s computer apparently does have hardware capable of generating one. So part of Dr. Soong’s achievement also seems to be making a non-evil AGI that runs on hardware that can fit in a human-sized body instead of a ship-sized one.