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A look at the nature of holographic characters and how it could relate to ethical concerns about AI.

The holodecks and ESPECIALLY characters like Moriarty and the Doctor bring up all kinds of ethical questions that Trek has been side stepping for decades.

The thing that always amuses me about holodeck characters is that the hologram part really isn't the important thing - it's just an avatar, an interface. If you fall in love with a hologram, you're not actually in love with the hologram... you're in love with the ship's computer.

GrahamKennedy wrote:The thing that always amuses me about holodeck characters is that the hologram part really isn't the important thing - it's just an avatar, an interface. If you fall in love with a hologram, you're not actually in love with the hologram... you're in love with the ship's computer.

Maybe not the ships computer but the programming for that avatar.

Pretty much the same thing, really.

"Writes invoke technobabble to avoid it" aside, there's absolutely no reason in theory why they couldn't simply run, say, Leah Brahms's holopersonality and use it as the standard interface with the ship's computer - exactly as we saw them doing on Andromeda.

In fact they even did just that in the TOS episode where Kirk's computer was flirting with him and got upset when he threatened it.

"Computed, dear."

Would a personality be more efficient than the standard interface?

No idea, really. Geordi's experience in Booby Trap would certainly indicate that it could be useful.

And after all, the ship has ALL of these personalities stored in it. So the ship personality would be incredibly knowledgeable about pretty much anything and everything. I mean, even assuming it could only run one given set of skills at a time for some reason, there's no reason your ship avatar couldn't flip between, say, an EMH level of medical knowledge when Beverly is chatting with it in medbay, and then a Leah Brahms level of engineering knowledge when Geordi needs it. Throw in an equivalent tactical genius, scientific genius, etc. It could potentially be an amazing asset for the ship.

But of course that goes to the real reason the writers don't want to go down that road. Because if your ship can do all that, if it's really a sentient being combined with all the advantages of speed and an immense and perfect memory and all that... then of course you eventually arrive at the question of why it actually needs a crew aboard at all.

I dunno about it being more efficient, but it could "humanize" things for the crew depending on their preferences.