The new Star Trek is really going to have a problem with how technology has been changing since the earlier series. Either they accept it, and give everyone a smartphone-camera-tricorder and have drones that perform exploration and simple errands in which case they become insufferable selfie-taking millennials who are too lazy to carry their own laundry or whatever, or they ignore that and we mock them for having technology worse than our current day technology.
I think the issue here is that smartphones and drones would be a serious advantage in a situation like that, not just a convenience, but we still think of them as conveniences.
But then I think that very few people in sci-fi have dealt properly with the consequence of ubiquitous computing, they either bypass it entirely or come up with technology that’s worse than today’s. Bypassing it is a justifiable decision though, if you don’t you can end up with futures that end up looking ridiculous where everyone communicates with handheld fax machines.
The problem here is that the next logical step is Transhumanism. Why aren’t the crew of the Enterprise all paramilitary cyborgs who, while looking human externally, have in-built communications technology and redundant backup organs?
But Transhumanism isn’t the Humanism on which the original Star Trek was built. Star Trek was intended to be about Human stories, Human morality, Human ethics… Transhumanism is… well in many ways it’s deeper than that, pulling at threads that ordinary human ethics buries.
It comes down to how the picture of the world when a work is made informs the future. Mobile Suit Gundam was made in 1979 and it seems like Tomino may have envisioned grand space colonies and so forth, but not personal computers or the internet. A lot of works that were made before the days of widespread cellphone use may seem a bit head-scratching when limitations in communication are a plot point.
Now see, that applies to Classic, Original Series Trek, which has actually aged remarkably well all things considered, not this new J.J. Abrams Trek.
