AI's, holograms, and robots

[JirinPanthosa]

It really was. And it was lazy and stretched the credibility of the show, a lot.

Centuries of AI research, countless autonomous processes running seamlessly everywhere, but give an app a face and suddenly it has rights.

The EMH was supposed to an on and off-able emergency resource. That it remained operational when not required was a major bug for ship trying to conserve power. And the Terse, Tetchy, Sarcasm and arsehole sliders were all set too high in the personality settings. Smug mode should have been disabled too.

The whole thing could’ve been resolved with ctrl alt delete after each use.

I don't agree with that assessment. Sure, having a face made it easier for them to see the Doc as sentient, but as the show moved on he more and more developed a manifest free will greater than the sum of his programming. Having a face has little to do with the sentience except that it speeds up its recognition, if there was an equivalent of Exocomps they would have equally came around to see them as sentient.

 

[Butters]

I don't agree with that assessment. Sure, having a face made it easier for them to see the Doc as sentient, but as the show moved on he more and more developed a manifest free will greater than the sum of his programming. Having a face has little to do with the sentience except that it speeds up its recognition, if there was an equivalent of Exocomps they would have equally came around to see them as sentient.

I can accept that consciousness and sentience could emerge from a complex network as present in the brain, positronic brain or ships computer etc, I’ve even seen suggestions that cities could sentient in ways we’ll never comprehend, but that it would manifest itself in a hologram that wants to do human stuff, I just can’t buy.

A lonely hologram, a bored hologram, a hologram that listens to music? It’s a simulation of a person, not a replica.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Save Fiona!

 

[DonIago]

A lonely hologram, a bored hologram, a hologram that listens to music? It’s a simulation of a person, not a replica.

Isn't Data also a simulation of a person?

 

[Dukhat]

Can they join Starfleet like the EMH?

Isn't that answering your own question?

 

[Butters]

Isn't Data also a simulation of a person?

Data has positrons where we have neurons but the effect is the same. What convoluted data’s condition is that he was said to have been designed to not have emotions. That, and the emotion chip, and the inability to contract words, didn’t really make sense.

With holograms, they are forcefields and light projections responding to crew requirements controlled by a program.

The replicators perform tasks far more complex than removing a splinter, but no one thinks that is sentient. The holodeck can run a hundred realistic hologram people concurrently, but there’s no suggestion that those, or the holodeck itself is sentient.

I know I’d enjoy the show a lot more if I just ran with it, but the sentient hologram thing mostly makes me cringe.

 

[DonIago]

The replicators never provide evidence that they're self-aware, but I do think one could argue that Data is also controlled by a program, positronic matrix or otherwise.

Most holodeck programs never evince evidence of self-awareness (i.e. that they're holograms) either, though Vic may be a borderline case.

 

[F. King Daniel]

As good as those TNG Moriarty episodes were, having the Holodeck being able to create sentience that way was a bad call. It really makes Soong to look like an idiot. Positronic brain was supposed to be a huge deal, his life's work, something no one could duplicate... except every holodeck in every star ship could basically achieve the same results, even though no one had even designed them to do that.

How is Soong an idiot? Is everyone who made those room-sized analogue computers an idiot because digital technology came along a few years later?

 

[Longinus]

Isn't Data also a simulation of a person?

The whole point of Data is that he is an artificial person. He is built for that purpose, structure of his brain reflects the structure of human brain. This was a feat no one in the setting knew how to duplicate. It seems crazy to me that a much less sophisticated computer could achieve the same results pretty much by accident.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

With the complexity of a starships computer would it be classed as an artificial or cybernetic lifeform once bioneural circuitry is installed? It hears and speaks with its comm systems, sees with its sensors, reproduces with the replicators and holodecks, etc. so is it moral to enslave them and put them to work in dangerous situations without considering its wellbeing?

You can see how ridiculous this line of thought goes. At what point do you say 'no, this object in question was built for a certain function and no matter how complex it may appear to be, it is still a tool', to me that is what holograms are. Data is unique, but it wasn't until decades after his discovery that his status as a sentient lifeform was confirmed and safeguarded in Federation law.

 

[sunnie]

It depends, I guess. If you activate your hologram long enough, EMH of Voyager, for example, it will gain its personality(not a personality setting, but a personality-personality). It will experience things just like a human(or alien) baby tour around the world, and finally, it will almost be able to think. Well, think about it. After all, you yourself is a collective of lots of algorithms.

 

[Marynator]

As good as those TNG Moriarty episodes were, having the Holodeck being able to create sentience that way was a bad call. It really makes Soong to look like an idiot. Positronic brain was supposed to be a huge deal, his life's work, something no one could duplicate... except every holodeck in every star ship could basically achieve the same results, even though no one had even designed them to do that.

I always felt these were ok, I really don't have a problem myself with dedicated genius being matched or even exceeded by lucky accident. Don't we have so many wonderful discoveries this way? I feel it's also sort of the basis of the theory of evolution? I feel that it's best when Dr Moriarty was an isolated case, because it feels more like one of those unexplained super accidents that takes a lifetime to understand, and when it's done too often it does feel a little tacky to me.

 

[DonIago]

This is probably going to be a little contentious, but is a human infant sentient? It could be argued that Data or The Doctor or Vic are all more self-aware.

Put another way, if there is a real concern about sentient AIs, then I daresay the best practice would be to purge their memories on a regular basis to ensure they don't develop the level of cognitive processing at which point it might be argued that they have become self-aware, or more importantly should have a right to choose their destiny.

Didn't the Star Wars universe kind of establish the droid memory wiping as a routine thing precisely to avoid this issue?

 

[F. King Daniel]

This is probably going to be a little contentious, but is a human infant sentient?

40th trimester abortions for all!

 

[Tim Thomason]

This is probably going to be a little contentious, but is a human infant sentient? It could be argued that Data or The Doctor or Vic are all more self-aware.

Sentient as in can they feel? Yes, of course. "Star Trek sentience", aka sapience. Yeah, pretty much. They're not intelligent, yet, but they have the capacity for it as they grow. The same seems to apply to Data, although he was able to emulate full sentience early on, and had a very long learning curve.

 

[Sophie74656]

Do holograms have rights? Can a hologram get married? Can they join Starfleet like the EMH? Are they sentient?

I think it depends. In the future timeline in Endgame the Doctor was married to a human woman, so it was legal. In the main timeline it probably was not legal except in certain cases. I would assume that Data would be able to legally marry a flesh and blood person based on his previous trials which determined hia status.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Ceremonies have very little to do with formalizing marriages. They're all but optional, really. It's all about the license.

That's the thing, though. Marriage (in most Western countries, at least) is a legal license giving tax rights and designating legal partners for things like property inheritance and hospital visitation and so on. We have been redefining what marriage is in my lifetime, and are continuing that process (which I'm in favor of).

Marriage certainly exists in Star Trek. We see husbands and wives, we see several weddings across cultures in five of seven series, we see polygamous and polyamorous marriages. But are marriage licenses/contracts/certificates common?

I suspect the Federation doesn't bother, either leaving that decision to smaller jurisdictions, and maybe granting some simpler method of defining partnership/inheritance rights. Most of the marriages and weddings we see are cultural affairs, on par with someone getting engaged or throwing a Quinceñara today.

What I'm driving at is, that I don't think the Federation Council has any say whatsoever in the rights of marriage between two consenting adults, or even just one consenting adult and his favorite Vulcan Love Slave character. It's beyond their purview, and it's up to society (as it was for millennia until recently) to determine if everything's good or they're dealing with a creepy situation.

 

[lawman]

You can see how ridiculous this line of thought goes. At what point do you say 'no, this object in question was built for a certain function and no matter how complex it may appear to be, it is still a tool', to me that is what holograms are. Data is unique, but it wasn't until decades after his discovery that his status as a sentient lifeform was confirmed and safeguarded in Federation law.

Nothing ridiculous about it. A genuine robust AI meets every criterion for sapience we could care to apply, no matter what its physical substrate (biological, electronic, positronic, holographic, or what-have-you). This should be all the more self-evident in a society that acknowledges a wide variety of extraterrestrial intelligences. Any claim to the contrary would be little but bio-centric bigotry. Honestly, the only thing implausible to me about "Measure of a Man" is that it took decades for Data's legal rights to be affirmed.

That's the thing, though. Marriage (in most Western countries, at least) is a legal license giving tax rights and designating legal partners for things like property inheritance and hospital visitation and so on.
...
What I'm driving at is, that I don't think the Federation Council has any say whatsoever in the rights of marriage between two consenting adults, or even just one consenting adult and his favorite Vulcan Love Slave character. It's beyond their purview, and it's up to society (as it was for millennia until recently) to determine if everything's good or they're dealing with a creepy situation.

Well, technically, in the US today it's mostly not a matter for the federal government either; the details are left up to the states. The federal courts only intervene as far as necessary to ensure that the states don't discriminate in any unconstitutional way. We might suppose that in the Federation, marriage still serves some useful function in terms of establishing defaults rights for inheritance, etc., but that the details are mostly left to individual worlds... so long as they don't defy the Federation charter by discriminating against any sapient life-forms.

Bottom line, marriage requires the capacity to consent. Nothing less, and seldom anything more.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I can accept that consciousness and sentience could emerge from a complex network as present in the brain, positronic brain or ships computer etc, I’ve even seen suggestions that cities could sentient in ways we’ll never comprehend, but that it would manifest itself in a hologram that wants to do human stuff, I just can’t buy.

A lonely hologram, a bored hologram, a hologram that listens to music? It’s a simulation of a person, not a replica.

How do you make the distinction? It can't be as simple as whether the AI has a physical body or whether it interacts with the world through a projection of light. It's a complex question you're trying to make simplistic.