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How to save DATA and Mass Produce him?

Thousands of Datas... isn't that becoming... a race? won't we be judged by how we treat that race?
Such a good episode. You should watch it sometime ;)
I have, and I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions, especially given that he is mechanical and can be reprogrammed.

Especially in light of "The Doctors" right to be recognized as a Sentient Life Form being inconclusive.

The question of whether a AI program or Android with AI in it that is programmed will be considered a "Sentient & Sapient" Life Form is still up for debate IMO.
 
"Can be reprogrammed" doesn't appear particularly relevant - Geordi LaForge could be reprogrammed, too.

Conversely, the Federation's "slave armies" rely on the slaves volunteering, for whatever reason; the same would then hold true for an army of Data copies, even if the means exist to reprogram the slaves.

But "Measure of a Man" is an excellent example of sentience being irrelevant. Starfleet doesn't care whether its employees are sentient or not. UFP legislation doesn't appear to care, either. And today's RW legislation is silent on the concept of sentience as well. Give a chicken a passport and you might sneak it into being a fully empowered individual of the society. In theory - but for the UFP, things like that must have been practice for centuries already, with millennia of "grandfathering" inherited from the member cultures to boot. It thus appears that not caring is a viable policy, and that "how to treat" is not dependent on that little detail at all.

Timo Saloniemi
 
^^^^
Apparently there is some other version of Star Trek that I've not seen or been made aware of. I have no clue what you're talking about or how you could even come to that conclusion from what has been portrayed in Star Trek to-date.
 
Can't help there much, except by suggesting episodes to watch. "Mind's Eye", say. And "Measure of a Man".

Timo Saloniemi
 
Can't help there much, except by suggesting episodes to watch. "Mind's Eye", say. And "Measure of a Man".

Timo Saloniemi
Seen both and recall nothing which stages, implies or hints that people serving in Starfleet are slaves of any sort.
 
So we are in agreement: "slave armies" are a misnomer, regardless of whether they consist of obedient, programmable humans, Vulcans and the like, or obedient, programmable Soongian androids, Zimmermanian holograms and the like. And thus the whole "argument" at the tail end of the trial is a straw man, irrelevant to anything much. Federation armies won't get any more slavish with the addition of a few Tellarites or Soongians.

Likewise, Data's sentience was irrelevant throughout that episode, and never was established one way or another even at its conclusion; Data's rights didn't hinge on it in any fashion. What was more interesting was it having been irrelevant even back when he was accepted into Starfleet. Seems the organization really is a Foreign Legion of sorts, not merely not asking too many questions, but in fact never asking any at all, including "Uh, are you even alive?"!

Timo Saloniemi
 
I have, and I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions, especially given that he is mechanical and can be reprogrammed.

Especially in light of "The Doctors" right to be recognized as a Sentient Life Form being inconclusive.

The question of whether a AI program or Android with AI in it that is programmed will be considered a "Sentient & Sapient" Life Form is still up for debate IMO.
The conclusion was basically in dubio pro reo. When unsure about someone's sentience, sapience, or lifeform status, assume what is better for them until proof of the contrary is found.
 
Saving Data is one thing, mass producing him is another. Data is the product of his lifetime experiences, and mass producing him at a certain point wouldn't matter, as his experiences would than splinter and change depending on which unit is at which location.

That being said, I would be all for saving the unique being that is Data. Instead of mass producing datas, why not just make other androids? Data was very close to cracking the secret of the positronic brain with Lal, who was unique and chose a different path from her creator, so we know Lal was not strictly a Data copy.

Or as others have already mentioned, take a difference approach away from the positronic mind. It's obvious Starfleet has the ability to create a self aware holgraphic program, and using something like the mobile holo-emitter (if Starfleet could replicate 29th century tech) would give them the same effective end, with the added benefit of the hologram being close to invincible as long as the holo-emitter itself doesn't take damage. Imagine the emitter being shielded to fix that issue, or even just have some armor.
 
Now--a Thomas Riker situation would be the only way you could make another real Data--without risking a Lore in the mix. Speaking of--he is in pieces, right?

The folks who wanted Data in Measure would probably have been given Lore in his place--if Section 31 had some pull.

There is a story right there.
 
What the hell are you talking about? I do not recall any evidence on-screen (or anywhere else for that matter) that anyone in Starfleet has been drafted or is otherwise serving under duress. Everyone we've seen seems to have volunteered and is serving under their own initiative.
Possibly referring to Arcturan clone armies?
I could see a rogue operation to rescue Data in the fashion indicated, and the fact that it was rogue would answer the ethical questions as well. I also see Starfleet and the UFP being horrified and arresting the conspirators once they find out.
 
Possibly referring to Arcturan clone armies?
Possibly, but again no indication that their service was under anything other than voluntary conditions. I would assume even a clone would be entitled to self-determination. (this isn't Star Wars after all)
 
Possibly, but again no indication that their service was under anything other than voluntary conditions. I would assume even a clone would be entitled to self-determination. (this isn't Star Wars after all)
How could they be? If they're clones, the people making them choose how they're raised, educated, indoctrinated. It'd be counterproductive, if not pointless, to put any ideas in their heads that don't end with them having the exact point-of-view you want them to have, and since clones armies are mass-produced by definition, the very process of education, the balance of nature and nurture, could be standardized to always produce the desired result. It's "The Boys From Brazil" to the hundredth power. There's an argument to be made for granting clones civil rights and self-determination, since any that had some freak encounter during their lives that made them decide soldiering wasn't for them after all would no longer be the clone soldier you ordered, and just letting them go off would be the cleanest solution for everyone, but there's also an argument not to give them that choice, because acknowledging that capacity could make it seem like raising beings from birth in a precisely-controlled environment mean to make them unquestioning tools of the state is immoral. Which it is. But if you're going to educate your clone soldiers in a holistic, open-ended manner where they're likely as not to choose not to be clone soldiers, what's the point? You're just pumping new people into the general population. You could get the same result with baby bonds or raising the price of contraception or some other way of juicing population growth the old-fashioned way.

Anyway, Timo is referring to Starfleet officers as "slaves" in the same sense that a nominally free worker could be called a "wage-slave;" they're not formally regarded as chattel, but their employer provides them the means to remain alive as a condition of their employment; you can't really say someone is "free" if the consequence of disobedience is that they lose access to housing, food, and medical care (even though the employer controls access to those necessities indirectly, by providing money, rather than supplying them directly). Similarly, Timo is saying that the average Starfleet officer isn't that different from a hypothetical mass-produced Data; they are trained to be obedient, to give their lives if asked to do so, to perform any act they are ordered to regardless of their opinions or beliefs, and if they object or fail to do so outside of carefully proscribed circumstances, they are punished. Just because they volunteered initially doesn't make them any more autonomous than robots when Captain Brannigan is ordering wave after wave of Starfleet "volunteers" to their deaths, or they're being kept fighting on AR-558 for five months when they're "supposed" to be rotated off after three, or Captain Riker decides they need to ram the Borg Cube. When you've got a volunteer army willing to do all that, what do you need a mass-produced army of un-people for?

(I don't think that captures the whole picture; Federation bigwigs would certainly be more tempted to do bad things if their officers went from being "expendable" to "disposable," with no grieving families, and if it could be guaranteed they'd have no moral or personal qualms about any order, and would never confess or leak or whistleblow about anything, and they'd have a harsher solution for noncompliance than what is given to a conventional officer; we've already seen that, with the old EMH programs being recycled as holographic laborers, and if they hadn't been, they probably would've been deleted outright, and the worst thing they did was be brusque.)

Which I guess means he and I are making the same point; If you can shape the worldview of your officers, be it by a public relations campaign, from-birth training, or positronic programming, you don't need to coerce them into obedience, they'll do it because they already agree that the powers that be have the right goals and the moral authority to use them to execute those goals in whatever manner they see fit. The saving grace is that the normal way of getting a Starfleet officer is, ironically, a lot more failure-prone, and thus more resilient against failures of leadership. A good officer in a crunch could be exactly what would be considered a "bad" toy soldier.
 
If you could duplicate Data with a transporter and a replicator, you could do the same with any organic crewmember.
This is refuted by the existence of Thomas Riker which is stated to be a rare, virtually unrepeatable accident.
 
If you could duplicate Data with a transporter and a replicator, you could do the same with any organic crewmember.
This is refuted by the existence of Thomas Riker which is stated to be a rare, virtually unrepeatable accident.
But you can't duplice Data with a transporter under normal circumstances. As far as replicating him, nobody's ever tried.

But since he's a Android, I'm willing to be that replicating him should be reasonable.
Normal replicators can't replicate living biology, but Data isn't Organic in nature.

He's a very complicated Android that is man made out of computers, servos, etc.

So I'm willing to bet that replicating him is possible, just resource intensive given his complexity.
 
Plenty of materials and devices can't be replicated, it's certain that Soong's positronic brain is one of them, and probably several other parts and pieces of Data.
 
Where's on screen evidence of that?
I'm pretty sure if you could just replicate a working positronic brain, "The Measure of a Man" and "The Offspring" would've been very different episodes. It seems more reasonable to assume it's impossible than to think that "Try to replicate one" wouldn't be any Starfleeter's first solution to needing another of something, and that in forty-some years (more, actually, since Soong only made a half-dozen or so androids, most before Data), it never occurred to anyone to make the attempt.
 
I'm pretty sure if you could just replicate a working positronic brain, "The Measure of a Man" and "The Offspring" would've been very different episodes. It seems more reasonable to assume it's impossible than to think that "Try to replicate one" wouldn't be any Starfleeter's first solution to needing another of something, and that in forty-some years (more, actually, since Soong only made a half-dozen or so androids, most before Data), it never occurred to anyone to make the attempt.
Totally.

Well, "The Measure of a Man" covered (but didn't answer) the ethics around the concept. In practice at least one egghead at the time suggested that he COULD replicate Data, but the real question was whether he SHOULD, or even whether he could legally compel Data to allow it to pass.

Mark
Erm, there were also plot points in "The Measure Of A Man" that it was not certain that Maddox's attempt to replicate Data would even succeed and that Maddox couldn't satisfy Data that he would not be harmed by the experiment. So, there were more, equally real questions than whether Maddox should replicate Data. Other "real" questions raised by the episode were whether Data's life was worth the attempt and whether Data's right to choose for himself was less of a concern than a person's right to pursue his own ambitions, whatever they might be.

DATA: Have you determined how the electron resistance across the neural filaments is to be resolved?
MADDOX: Not precisely.
DATA: That would seem to be a necessary first step.
MADDOX: I am confident that I will find the answer once I examine the filament links in your anterior cortex.
DATA: But if the answer is not forthcoming, your model will not function.
MADDOX: I do not anticipate any problems.
RIKER: You seem a little vague on the specifics.
PICARD: What are the risks to Commander Data?
MADDOX: Negligible.
DATA: Captain, I believe his basic research lacks the specifics necessary to support an experiment of this magnitude.

[...]

DATA: That while I believe it is possible to download the information contained in the positronic brain, I do not think you have acquired the expertise necessary to preserve the essence of those experiences. There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure.

[...]

MADDOX: Rights! Rights! I'm sick to death of hearing about rights! What about my right not to have my life work subverted by blind ignorance?​

http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/135.htm

It's also worth pointing out that Data did not seem to necessarily object to the idea of being replicated or even replicable.

DATA: Thank you. And, Commander, continue your work. When you are ready, I will still be here. I find some of what you propose intriguing.​

The issue was about being forced into an inadequately conceived procedure against his will, and about being denied the right to choose for himself.
 
And, Commander, continue your work. When you are ready, I will still be here. I find some of what you propose intriguing.
It would be awesome if Maddox actually returned in PIC. Brian Brophy is a really nice guy, and it would be so cool to have a sequel to a S1 episode 30 years later!
 
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