Nebusj said:
Not always, actually: Kirk was fine letting the Guardian or the Provider or the Oracle or whatever his name was to rule Yonada in ``For The World Is Hollow And The Acronym for This Title Is Longer Than Every Epsiode Title For Voyager Combined''.
With the Guardian, it's actually ambiguous as to whether or not he
is a machine (IIRC he says 'both, and neither'), moreover he does not rule over anything. He offers people a gateway into time, but he's not attempting to restructure time in the way, say, Landru restructed his planet's society. He is completely passive: A plot device in its purest form.
The Oracle is certainly something of an exception, although even in that case it is an imperious machine ruling through religious dictum that must be disobeyed - even to help itself. So as exceptions go that's not much.
And for that matter he let the android society in ``I, Mudd'' go as it liked after getting it cured of its plan to take over the galaxy.
The latter part of that sentence is more important than the first.
They cannot be allowed to control societies, and Kirk prevents that.
Anyway, the warming of Roddenberry's views on androids is consistent with another of the ideas of the Original Series, albeit one that's not really expressed quite as clearly as the fear of totalitarianism: the idea that humanity with technology is capable of greater things, and doing greater justice, than humanity without.
True. But an important distinction is that technology is great and beneficial so long as it is at the service of man. Intelligent technology, which almost immediately posits itself as superior to man, is a threat.
On the TOS scale, then, Data occupies a middle ground: He is not subservient to man and though, while superior to him mentally and physically, he does not intend to dominate. He presents himself as an equal of man, and even envies the qualities man has that he lacks - rather than depising them, or attempting to correct them.
