A Star Trek Day conversation on automation, work, scarcity, and human purpose
Long before modern artificial intelligence, large language models, or autonomous systems entered our daily lives, Star Trek envisioned a 24th-century world fundamentally transformed by ambient compute power, automation, and AI infrastructure. In Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision, technology solved basic resource scarcity and eliminated routine labor—giving rise to a “post-work” society where human success was no longer measured by wealth or survival, but by purpose, craftsmanship, exploration, and self-actualization.
As we stand on the precipice of a new industrial revolution driven by rapid breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, we may be approaching a threshold that Star Trek has long invited us to imagine. As AI takes on increasingly complex cognitive and physical tasks, we face profound questions about our collective future: What is the role of people in a post-AI world? How do we maintain purpose and relevance when algorithms redefine labor? And what governance frameworks do we need to ensure technological abundance benefits everyone?
Celebrate Star Trek Day with Hopkins at Home for a captivating virtual conversation bridging cutting-edge computer science and global technology policy. Featuring Dr. Mark Dredze, John C. Malone Professor and Inaugural Director of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute, alongside moderator Dr. Darcie Draudt-Véjares (A&S ’21 PhD), Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this panel will move beyond sci-fi tropes of androids and rogue machines to examine how automation is reshaping societal productivity, what it means to find human relevance in an automated age, and how research at Johns Hopkins is helping steer our technological future toward human flourishing.