Artificial Life Rights

[Mikey]

... or with only a modicum of the free will we've all come to expect.

[sunnyside]

Actaully I thought the doctor had more control. Writing subroutines for himself and the like.

As for the Touring test there is an issue with it in regards to really advanced computers. Now mind you once something can pass a Touring test I may consider it an AI, but I'm not sure I'd call it sentient.

Think of chess for a moment. Like conversation people believed chess required creativity and a proper mind to run it. Computers do fine at it now. By (quite a bit of) extension a non-sentient computer should be able to have a conversation.

(Oh what were those IRC bots a while back called that could pass as humans for a while. I remember the article.)

@mikey Yes I think you could reign in a hologram by limiting their ability to expand themselves, grow a neural net, or whatever it is they do. Just deny the program the capacity for that spark of self awareness, to consider themselves alive in any way or to have actual (as opposed to pretend) feelings.

My earlier comment was actually in regards to holograms in the holodeck. They need not each have their own intelligence but could just be run by the computer in the same way that you would play your world of warcraft character. You would just then need to ensure the main computer doesn't become sentient.

This may not be how they do it now. It seems that they might just throw some subroutines into the biio-neural gel packs or whatever and let them grow and function, which is a recipie for distaster/sentience.

[Mikey]

I keep thinking of Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (later filmed as Blade Runner) in which empathy tests had to be administered to detect androids, because test of intelligence, self-preservation, creativity, or self-determination were useless.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

I have wondered why the ruling on Data in "Measure of a Man" wasn't applied to the Doctor. It begins to look a bit odd to focus on the rights of holograms specifically and judge them separately when it already had been established that another form of artificial life was legally recognized. When it comes down to it, both Data and the Doctor get their intelligence from a computer; only their bodies differ.

[Monroe]

The computer systems differ too.
Data is a positronic net.
The doctor is a standard federation computer... which is a living capsual... or it is a piece of future technology...

[Mikey]

They are different forms of technology, but are just that. What we are considering is the effect, not the mechanism - which makes CPH's point more valid. If an organic intelligent species with a completely different brain architecture was on teh scene, we wouldn't discount their sentience merely because it was arrived at differently. Why then does Starfleet/UFP make that distinction between the Doctor and Data?

[Monroe]

I think we just answered our own question.

Holograms come in all shapes and sizes depending on the program. Positonic Brains only come in one that we know of. I'm sure in an actual court case (I didnt see the show so I dont know) the question of holograms came up but because holograms majority are for recreation and turn off the decision to only extend the ruling to Positronic Brains applied.

At the time of TNG Holograms weren't used as much as they were in Voy. While the technology has been around for awhile, even ENT ran into it, common use of holograms is relatively new for Star Trek.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Holograms did not come up in Data's court case, but there was a precedent for sentient holograms before the Doctor in the person of the Moriarty hologram. What I'm asking is, once the question came up in Voyager, why wasn't the Data precedent simply extended?

On a real world note, this isn't the only problem caused by the producers desire not to "cross" the series. This is probably the real-world reason there weren't Sovs in the Dominion War.

[Jordanis]

Yeah. It's a bizarre sort of hangup. I mean, I suppose I can see a vague notion that people watching one series should be expected to know another, but it's not like they don't insert more complicated independent concepts into every episode.

As for the sovs, I bet some twit just didn't want to spoil the uniqueness of the E-E. At least, that was the thrust of his dumb argument.