Why would Lore want Data's emotion chip?

[Mojochi]

The thing is, Lore is very smart, & we know from the creator himself that something is wrong with Lore. As smart as he is, Lore would know that. So even if he is playing on sympathies for effect, the odds are still in favor of him knowing full well he's not functioning the intended way. Honestly, wouldn't having the kind of wildly erratic emotions he has be a miserable way to live?

 

[DonIago]

I dunno, are psychopathic people generally miserable, or do they lack the awareness or care about their state enough to be miserable?

 

[Mojochi]

I dunno, are psychopathic people generally miserable, or do they lack the awareness or care about their state enough to be miserable?

I'd think some could be, but can we really be specific about Lore's state as being standardly psychopathic? What happens when a machine experiences the wrong mixture of emotion? In some ways his psychology might be unique to their kind, such that when it is abnormal, it might not be comparable to Human psychology

Is what a Vulcan deems affectionate the same as what a Human does? As such, is what would be considered psychopathic for a human necessarily so for a Soong android, or is he merely responding to some faulty emotional dynamic that results in this behavior?

It's still just my own imagined take on him, but I always felt like Lore was just suffering from an overabundance of emotion, kind of like a bipolar person. After he kills Soong, it's never mentioned by him again. Is it possible he may have killed him in a fit of rage, & then some time afterward, had an equally pronounced state of grief over having done it?

His choice to not immediately kill, but instead corrupt Data in Descent, for example, Could he have chosen that because he actually does have love for Data, & wanted him to be a brother? It would've been way easier to kill him & eliminate maybe the only individual alive who could stand in his way. That action kind of hints to me that Lore does love Data, even though he is also consumed with darker emotions that make it a terrifying kind of love

It's easy to vilify Lore. He's a villain lol, but Spiner does a wonderful job imho of giving us some depth to work with, to suggest there is more there than just a caricature bad guy. There's motives, not all of which are rooted in negative emotion, though granted, jealousy & revenge tend to take the front seat

 

[UnknownSample]

It's common to be miserable and put yourself in denial over it. All the ranting about how much better he is than Data obviously comes out of some sense of inferiority.
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I was never someone who corrected people, but now everyone seems to say "there's..." followed by something plural, so please put up with my saying it ought to be "there are" motives... Good post!

 

[Herbert]

Yes, which is exactly what Lore would do in order to manipulate Data and Soong.

"Poor me" is a classic method of establishing control of a situation.

You could be right but in that one scene, where Lore says "it was in your power to fix me" He seems sincere. I took it as sincerity anyway. Just because Lore is deceitful doesn't means he's deceitful all the time.

 

[DonIago]

Right. There's no way to know for sure.

I suppose we could ask Lore whether he was being sincere...

 

[Jedi_Master]

Lore is a narcissist. If it doesn't already belong to him, it should.

 

[Mojochi]

I was never someone who corrected people, but now everyone seems to say "there's..." followed by something plural, so please put up with my saying it ought to be "there are" motives... Good post!

There're?

 

[Qonundrum]

Since Soong programmed Lore, then switched him off later, and Lore's programming hadn't changed since... is it Lore being psychopathic or narcissist or is it merely an extension of its creator's programming ability gone wild? Why build a replacement bot to begin with instead of reprogramming Lore once the power button was pressed?

Soong seems to be the narcissist responsible for everything that's ultimately happened, responsibility abdicated and in a really bad way. Made for a couple of great TV outings though!

 

[Mojochi]

Since Soong programmed Lore, then switched him off later, and Lore's programming hadn't changed since... is it Lore being psychopathic or narcissist or is it merely an extension of its creator's programming ability gone wild? Why build a replacement bot to begin with instead of reprogramming Lore once the power button was pressed?

Soong seems to be the narcissist responsible for everything that's ultimately happened, responsibility abdicated and in a really bad way. Made for a couple of great TV outings though!

I've long since thought Soong was an obsessive, single-minded narcissist. He only had 2 design patterns for god sake... himself, & his wife, & he apparently gave up on 4 androids before Data. Lal was a far worse failure than Lore or B-4 (catastrophic actually) yet, Data actually preserves her, I'd presume for future resurrection.

In Brothers, he mentions Data as "the next logical step", but I really can't see why that would ever be. The next logical step is to bring online another sentient being, who would require the same exorbitant amount of time & resources to construct & develop, in full, only so you can make one single change, by denying it the aspect, that the previous attempt had go wrong? (I'll just hope it's more complicated than that)

Forgive me, but that seems like neither a logical nor scientific next step to me, when you already have a failure to deal with, & a correction to be made before any further steps can be taken. If NASA made a space shuttle model & put it into service, & it turned out to have one very serious flaw, but was otherwise a completed & functional design, would they scrap it, & use every aspect of its design, except that one flaw, to design a new model, or recall the original model to be retooled?

That just seems more efficient & responsible to me. Is there an engineering or scientific model for which this method has merit?

I mean geez, Data could eventually shut off his emotions. Couldn't the designer just shut of Lore's?

 

[Timo]

What's unscientific about altering the single parameter that supposedly is wrong? That's exactly how you hunt down, corner and kill bugs.

Building something radically different would just introduce dozens of all-new potential modes of failure, without adequately assessing the one thing that was known to be wrong.

But building an identical thing and building it better seems obvious. Soong has this production line going, capable of churning out prototype after prototype. Why destroy the failed one in the process of turning it into a hopefully more successful one? Better to retain the failure so that it can be evaluated against the improved model, like Soong did.

In the end, we can see Soong was nowhere near completing his experimentation: he never released Lore to the public as his masterpiece, but he never released Data, either. Heck, he didn't even release the Tainer android, even though failing to do so meant he would remain Often Wrong Soong, the laughing stock of the AI community. He was aiming high, and burning prototypes on the way there.

Only his wife was sentimental about what had already been achieved...

I mean geez, Data could eventually shut off his emotions. Couldn't the designer just shut of Lore's?

Apparently not. That is, these positronic androids of his don't appear to be trivially simple machines, hence all the experimentation. No doubt Soong would incessantly fine-tune Lore, then at some point give up and start anew with another unit off the production line and see what would make the difference. And, once finished, would dump both the original failure and the expendable testbed for the fix, and proceed with the next, more ambitious step. Which in turn might require its own counterpoint specimen for testing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mojochi]

Building something radically different would just introduce dozens of all-new potential modes of failure, without adequately assessing the one thing that was known to be wrong.

That's not what I was suggesting though. Not building a radically new model. Building no new model until you sufficiently get to the bottom of what was wrong with the existing one. Especially in this case, to not do that may put the next incarnation at similar levels of risk, or it at least shows little regard for the existing model, which in these cases are apparently sentient beings he's making, which puts him in the realm of irresponsibility to his creation imho

You don't just build another one, without determining why what you had built isn't working. While Lore isn't the successful model, neither yet is Data, at least where his completion is concerned. Basically, all he did was build another one, for no explained reason. The only possible rationale I could think of is that there is some level of integration that just makes Lore uncorrectable, as in, once he is what he is, there's no turning back the mechanism, to disengage the malfunctioning aspect, but if that's the case, then is he ultimately lying to Lore when he tells him he planned to get back to him?

Mostly I'm just saying, is it really the next logical step to build a new one that's no different really, except sans the faulty emotions thing, instead of shutting down production & doing a failure analysis on what you HAVE built? (Which is not just a mechanism, but a being endowed with a life, deserving of help before you move on)

But building an identical thing and building it better seems obvious.

That's kind of my point. For all intents & purposes, he didn't build it better. He just built another one, & didn't add that part.. yet