Here's how I would fix Kurtzman's terrible ideas concerning synths in Picard. (If any of this is similar to something already addressed in the show, forgive me. I have only watched a little of Season One).
After Data is destroyed in Nemesis, Bruce Maddox is left without a blueprint of how to pursue creating sentient androids. His attempt to solve this problem is the synth program.
Maddox speculates that dozens of proto-Soong androids--"synths"--could be networked to operate as many-and-one, which might (for some reason) inspire at least one unit to become sentient.
Unfortunately, this works too well. The synths (in order to make them productive) are all assigned to work on Mars. But when one of the human workers jokes about destroying a synth, it awakens the unit in much the same way that Lal became fully sentient: by inspiring fear.
Fear, it turns out, is a primordial and necessary component to self-awareness, since it inspires self-preservation. Unfortunately, the awakened synth acts instinctively to protect itself by immediately attacking the source of its fear, which at that moment are all humans in its vicinity. The impulse moves through all the networked synths as well, causing the rebellion.
Meanwhile, the Zhat Vash is a cult that believes all sentient AI is by nature hostile dues to their misinterpretation of the message left behind on the Grief Planet. The synth rebellion is their first experience of AI's actually trying to kill organic life en masse, so this naturally confirms their dogma. But this sort of reaction is what has inspired previous generations of AI to believe that humanoids are the ones who cannot abide AI, creating a vicious cycle of fear inspired by a misunderstanding of fear.
Resolving this dilemma and breaking the cycle, then, is what "ambassador" Picard would have been tasked to do. If Kurtzman didn't suck.
After Data is destroyed in Nemesis, Bruce Maddox is left without a blueprint of how to pursue creating sentient androids. His attempt to solve this problem is the synth program.
Maddox speculates that dozens of proto-Soong androids--"synths"--could be networked to operate as many-and-one, which might (for some reason) inspire at least one unit to become sentient.
Unfortunately, this works too well. The synths (in order to make them productive) are all assigned to work on Mars. But when one of the human workers jokes about destroying a synth, it awakens the unit in much the same way that Lal became fully sentient: by inspiring fear.
Fear, it turns out, is a primordial and necessary component to self-awareness, since it inspires self-preservation. Unfortunately, the awakened synth acts instinctively to protect itself by immediately attacking the source of its fear, which at that moment are all humans in its vicinity. The impulse moves through all the networked synths as well, causing the rebellion.
Meanwhile, the Zhat Vash is a cult that believes all sentient AI is by nature hostile dues to their misinterpretation of the message left behind on the Grief Planet. The synth rebellion is their first experience of AI's actually trying to kill organic life en masse, so this naturally confirms their dogma. But this sort of reaction is what has inspired previous generations of AI to believe that humanoids are the ones who cannot abide AI, creating a vicious cycle of fear inspired by a misunderstanding of fear.
Resolving this dilemma and breaking the cycle, then, is what "ambassador" Picard would have been tasked to do. If Kurtzman didn't suck.
