Did Voyager have any technical advances?

Yeah, Voyager was considered a state of the art ship when it was launched. One of the advances that we suggested for the Starship Voyager was that it had a series of what we called neural gel packs. The neural gel packs were part of the computer system on Voyager and they were also part of the navigation system.

Again, that idea's taking its lead from current technology. Neural computing is a design architecture for computation that tries to mimic the interconnections of neurons in a human brain. Instead of these very simple yes/no sort of binary circuits that are common in computers right now, we�re hoping that in the not-too-distant future we might be able to build computers that actually have multiple inputs and outputs for any given circuit. They can therefore better address questions that involve shades of grey instead of this very simple binary logic that computers today are restricted to. Computers that are built on a neural architecture would be much faster, more intelligent and better able to process ambiguous data.

One of the things that we�ve always been very careful about on Star Trek is we never want the computer to be smarter than the crew. Certainly, we don�t want the computer to be smarter than our captain because then you wonder; 'Why is this captain in charge of the ship? Why don�t they just let the computer run everything?' So we�ve intentionally, I think, reined in computer technology on Star Trek.

At one level I suspect computers will be far more sophisticated twenty years from now than they are on any of the Star Trek shows, but on another level, do we really want computers to run our lives? I can believe that in the not-too-distant future we might make a conscious decision to sort of scale back certain kinds of computer applications. I don�t think we will ever really computers totally make our decisions for us the way that a Captain Picard or a Captain Kirk wouldon how to carry out a mission.

Computers will certainly be informing those decision, but partly for dramatic reasons on Star Trek and, I think, partly just for sake of preserving our humanity, we don�t want the computers to be in the driver�s seat, we don�t want the computers to be in charge, so we can�t portray them as too intelligent.