What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

Spoiler: DISCO Season 4

The writers here pulled a VOYAGER on us... one sentence would have fixed a glaring error. Especially being a streaming show, where there is no set time limit on episode length.

It created artificial drama. The episode didn't need it. Personally, I think it brought it down a bit.

 

Sorry if this answer already came up. 443 pages is a lot to go through.

I'm not sure if this is even controversial (or just plain common sense) but ... considering what we know about holograms in Star Trek via Moriarty, the Doctor, Vic Fontaine, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. They clearly can grow a sense of self-awareness and desire to exist beyond being play things for the Starfleet crew. In "Flesh and Blood" - we see that you can even "adjust" the holograms to experience fear and pain.

So when they use holograms in the holodeck for their own amusement - how is it not a moral issue? I find it especially weird with VOY since that is a central arc for The Doctor - growing beyond his programming. Is it ok to harm a hologram if they have not yet "grown"? We are supposed to laugh at Quark's "Vulcan Love Slave" program - but if the Vulcan in that program grew self-aware - is it ok to still continue with a program that essentially erases consent? What about the programs where characters are training and gunning down/slicing holographic enemies? Does the crew need to wait until they are self aware before being bothered by it?

I feel like Trek tries to bake their cake and it too on this subject. Considering what they tell us about the EMH - it seems rather gross that the other Starfleet officers routinely have sex with or kill holograms...

 

And whatever happened to Moriarty by the end of TNG? Surely Voyager coming home could have given him hard light emitters with the technology they had discovered. Did they just dump him somewhere?

 

Yes. He was dropped off in mid-Atlantic and became the captain of the Enterprise.

 

assuming his little self contained universe survived the crash on Verdian 3.

 

I don't think there was that much damage to the saucer most of it seemed external so wonder what would have got salvaged.
Maybe novel writers would do something with Moriarty one day.

 

Yea, I was channel flipping once and came on a western just as DeForest Kelly got shot. "Bang, ugh. [flop]" I could not tell you the name of the film.

 

Yeah, I feel like Star Trek is kind of confusing when it comes to holograms, and it's been like this since season 1 TNG when Dixon Hill's friend wondered what happened to him when the program turned off.

The way I see it, there's:

• Moriarty - A regular hologram (apparently) made sapient by the Enterprise's computer somehow.
• The Doctor - An unusually sophisticated program that evolved to become "as close to a sentient life form as any hologram could hope to be" through continual upgrades and just being left on.
• Vic Fontaine - Designed to be more than a regular hologram, but no one wants to think too hard about if he's a real person.
• Basically every other hologram - Pretty much just the computer doing some role playing.

I wouldn't say that other holograms, like Da Vinci or La Sirena's crew, are alive or conscious in any way, because that would be all kinds of horrifying and wouldn't make sense when you've got stories about the rights of AI happening at the same time.

 

Does make me wonder if the D's computer can make a sentient Moriarty is the D's computer itself capable of attaining sentience? Would a starship have rights if it refused to follow orders?

 

There was a whole episode about this in Discovery S4.

 

With Software based Sentience, it's a FAR harder line to tell if it's "Real Sentience" or the mimicry of "Sentience" via Adaptive AI & various Algorithms designs to mimic Human Personality & Thought process.

That's why I agree with the judgement that they gave the rights of a Artist to the EMH, but didn't fully declare "The Doctor" as being Sentient.

You would really have to decompile and monitor every aspect of "The Doctor" to validate if he's sentient and what makes him unique from a software perspective, compared to a regular EMH. Especially since the fundamental EMH programming was done by Lewis Zimmerman.

 

I completely forgot about that one. That's another good example. So to some degree, they even wonder what is happening in "their world".

But would every hologram reach sentience with the same conditions? If Worf's training program kept running and the warriors in it were allowed to continue to exist - would any of them (or all of them) start to adapt and wonder about more beyond their programming?

You would think in a universe with A.I. rising to sentience - this would cause the Starfleet officers to be a bit wary of using the holodeck. It just seems like if you look at it from the perspective that A.I. can evolve - using the holodeck is very immoral and even our heroes (for a brief moment) engage in horrible, unspeakable acts that would place them in prison if they did it to someone with flesh and blood.

You're probably right that we're supposed to look at it as those examples are just rarities and it is not common amongst other holograms. The rest are really just photons and force fields.

I don't think it's a plot hole per se and I don't think the writers intended the holodeck to be this deep when it comes to morality. I just thought it is weird that it is never really brought up beyond the Hirogen torturing those holograms. It would have been nice if the Doctor came back with a new perspective on using the holodeck and if it really was moral to do so. In fact, this would be a good way to retire the holodeck and spare us from anymore "Oops the holodeck is broken and is now trying to kill us." episodes.

In fact, the whole concept of the holodeck is all over the place on a show like Star Trek. I get that we're just supposed to see it as advanced virtual reality and nothing more, but if you place it next to an "enlightened species" it is an oddity. I guess my "controversial" opinion on the holodeck (in general) is it is an all around incompatible (with being enlightened) and immoral concept with sentient holograms (as a possibility) that you can harm, the horror of larping traumatic wars for fun, and having adult relations with a likeness of a fellow officer that would not give you the time of day in the real world. Just seems really weird the more I think about it...

 

Can I ask how this is different than the current efforts people do in fantasizing about different situations in the real world? In the fan world alone there is art, fan fiction, costuming and porn parody. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

How an "enlightened" people would handle it is of course up for debate. Personally, I think that it is treated like video games, where these creations are limited by the capability of the computer. Hopefully, as they discover things with Moriarty, and The Doctor, etc. More limits would be placed on the capacity of the holograms for recreational use. One would hope they could be programed to be treated as NPCs in a video game, having no more autonomy than the character wandering around in Assassins' Creed.

 

The idea of a hologram 'accidentally' developing sentience/sapience is daft.
If a recreational AI subroutine in the ship's computer was prone to becoming sentient, then you would think that the Enterprise computer itself would have similar issues more often, since it itself is the whole computing "brain power" behind the thing.

Kor

 

It's a tough question, but I think it's just a matter of degrees at this point. We are currently restricted by our current technological level. So if a person writes a fan fiction where two characters fall in love, there is no potential consent issues at play here. It's two imaginary people in your head that you allow others to view via books or fan fic forums, etc. But a hologram is an extra degree of different. Then a potentially sentient hologram makes it even more awkward.

Or another analogy would be one of those "choose your own ending" books. If I did that, including maybe killing a villain or something, then the worst thing I did was turn a page and make a morally dubious choice in my head. But on the holodeck "choose your own ending", you're killing a being that was made to look as real as possible - including bleeding out or crying out in pain. A being, that according to Trek, could potentially reach self-awareness.

But in a lot of other ways, you're right. It's not all that different (when it comes to the fantasizing part) and I'm seeing more and more folks discuss this in various fandoms. (Not just about Star Trek)

Your video game example is a good one. Maybe in a century or so - some folks will find it gross or weird that we played video games reenacting wars while living in the same time as people who fought in some of those wars and told us how awful and traumatic they were.

Within the Trek universe - would it be in bad taste if Tom and Harry or O'Brien and Bashir reenacted Wolf 359 for "fun"? If that is too "contemporary" for them - what about reenacting the destruction of Starbase 1 from DISCO 100+ years earlier or the Eugenics Wars centuries earlier? Would that be in bad taste? If yes, then why isn't it in bad taste to reenact the Battle of Britain or the Alamo? If no, are there no limits to this?

True but aren't most of them already programmed to just be NPCs? Then after a lot of use and changes in the dynamic of their programming - they evolve (or have the potential to). IDK - I guess for me - the fact that there is even a potential for it would be really off putting. But I am looking at it from the perspective of a Trekkie. For all I know, the vast majority of Starfleet officers are oblivious to Vic Fontaine, Moriarty, and The Doctor...

 

I guess it would depend on the culture and the purpose behind such a recreation. If it is to feel apart of that moment, and all the emotions that go with it, I would say why not? To look at it simply there is a level of personal responsibility expected of Starfleet officers in particular, such that in early TNG there were no restrictions put on the comm system.

If it's in bad taste one would then have to ask who is it impacting? And again, how is that different from the multitude of video games out there?

Which is why restrictions would be recommend. Perhaps it was mere ignorance, as portrayed in the episode, with how powerful the computer could be. So, you insert artificial limits in to the NPC programing and it's done. And, likely as not, those examples were probably exceptions and required a lot of study.

 

Oh well there you go. But that's only because of Zora.

 

If you cannot tell the difference, is there one?

 

Depends on whom you ask and how you define it.

 

Honestly if you couldn't tell the difference it could be sentience. There's no proper test for that even in the real world, is there? I mean a foolproof test.