Commander Data and the Race of Machines

[Palanan]

I recently rewatched “Measure of A Man,” which is one of my top-five Trek episodes, and I had that rare experience where it was even better than I remembered. It really is a compact masterpiece.

But it also left me thinking. One of the strongest points in the episode was how the Federation would be judged on its treatment of Data and others like him. That led directly to the ruling that Data was not property, and had the freedom to choose his own fate.

—And yet, thirty years on, we see in ST: Picard that this ideal hasn’t exactly been put into practice. More the reverse, since we see exactly what Guinan alluded to: a race of disposable people, doing the work that’s too hazardous for humans to do.

What happened? In a specific, legal sense, do we know why the JAG’s ruling about Data was somehow never incorporated into broader Federation law?

[Traab]

I havent watched the new series but its entirely possible there are hard limits placed on how sentient these other beings are or are capable of becoming. Loopholes are a delight of a bureaucracy. Or its possible it got overturned higher up the judicial ladder. Data got left alone because it was mainly maddox who was so obsessed with reproducing him that he wanted to dismantle him iirc, and even if not, they may have felt it wasnt worth the aggro to try and dismantle data instead of figuring it out for themselves. After all, he IS a highly ranked member of the federation with a distinguished record serving on their flagship.

[Wintermoot]

I recently rewatched “Measure of A Man,” which is one of my top-five Trek episodes, and I had that rare experience where it was even better than I remembered. It really is a compact masterpiece.

But it also left me thinking. One of the strongest points in the episode was how the Federation would be judged on its treatment of Data and others like him. That led directly to the ruling that Data was not property, and had the freedom to choose his own fate.

—And yet, thirty years on, we see in ST: Picard that this ideal hasn’t exactly been put into practice. More the reverse, since we see exactly what Guinan alluded to: a race of disposable people, doing the work that’s too hazardous for humans to do.

What happened? In a specific, legal sense, do we know why the JAG’s ruling about Data was somehow never incorporated into broader Federation law?

Not officially, but the sense I personally got from watching Picard was something like this:

B9 was nowhere near the sophistication of Data and Lore. (I'm not sure what happened to Lore after he was disassembled in The Descent episodes of TNG and that's a big question I have that wasn't answered)

When Data loaded his personality and memory into B9 in the movie, it ended up overwhelming the inferior positronic brain and eventually degrading it so they had to turn him off and disassemble him.

Bruce Maddox (from measure of the man and Picard) was no Noonian Soongh. He tried to recreate Data from using B9 as a guide and the androids he created were... inferior. Inferior to the point they were considered less than human where Data was proven to be as good as human.

So the androids Bruce made while in the federation, the ones working in the shipyards of Mars, didn't measure up to the "measure of a man" ruling from that episode, which is why they were used as labor droids.

Now, here is where I kind of lose the threadline in Picard.

Either the androids on Mars revolted and fled into space where they were found my Maddox and Soong's son who helped them "evolve" into the andriods from the end of Picard.

OR Maddox and Soong went into the wilderness and made a new, superior, data-like version of the androids who then snuck back to the federation and led the androids on mars in a revolt.

I can't really tell which of those happened, but one of them, or some combination of them did. So the androids at the end of Picard were "as good as" Data, where as the androids working on Mars were not to that level to be considered as sapient citizens. (though that was probably an error in judgement)

Now I don't know how much of that is proven from watching Picard and how much is head canon, but that's my interpretation of the matter.

[Cikomyr2]

I recently rewatched “Measure of A Man,” which is one of my top-five Trek episodes, and I had that rare experience where it was even better than I remembered. It really is a compact masterpiece.

But it also left me thinking. One of the strongest points in the episode was how the Federation would be judged on its treatment of Data and others like him. That led directly to the ruling that Data was not property, and had the freedom to choose his own fate.

—And yet, thirty years on, we see in ST: Picard that this ideal hasn’t exactly been put into practice. More the reverse, since we see exactly what Guinan alluded to: a race of disposable people, doing the work that’s too hazardous for humans to do.

What happened? In a specific, legal sense, do we know why the JAG’s ruling about Data was somehow never incorporated into broader Federation law?

I think the issue with having a race of "disposable workers" being wrong is not that creating such race would be inherently good or evil, but that the Federation was in the process of establishing property rights vs individual rights for such race.

The entire premise of the episode is that Starfleet ordered Data to allow himself to be disassembled by Maddox. When Data resigned his commission, Starfleet/Maddox wanted to argue that Data couldn't do so because he was property of Starfleet and therefore had no say in his future.

The episode established that Data, and whomever may follow him, was therefore a full individual with all rights that came with it.


That doesn't mean you can't create more androids, just that those you create aren't your property, and you can't legally force them do to work they don't want to do. So I'd suspect B9 and all the martian androids always had the right to opt out at any moment they felt like it.

[Tvtyrant]

It gets wackier when you realize Star Fleet has access to both sentient solid holograms and teleporters (which can replicate living humans no problem.) Androids might be better workers than humans, but if humans wanted slaves they are spoiled for options.

[Cikomyr2]

It gets wackier when you realize Star Fleet has access to both sentient solid holograms and teleporters (which can replicate living humans no problem.) Androids might be better workers than humans, but if humans wanted slaves they are spoiled for options.

The issue with the holograms is that they at not discreet self sufficient entities. They are dependant on a rather hefty technological infrastructure compared to Androids who are self sufficient.

[KillianHawkeye]

The issue with the holograms is that they at not discreet self sufficient entities. They are dependant on a rather hefty technological infrastructure compared to Androids who are self sufficient.

They're not really any different from a biological creature which requires some technology for life support. Humans are also dependent on a hefty technological infrastructure in order to exist in outer space.

The questions raised on ST Voyager about the Doctor's rights as an individual directly echoed those that were raised about Data on ST The Next Generation. While the outcome wasn't as clear cut for the Doctor as it was for Data, at least the future timeline shown in Voyager's finale strongly implies that he eventually does earn full equality under the law.

As for the race of Data's "descendants" on ST Picard, didn't they indicate that the Martian uprising was actually caused by the secret Romulan anti-robots cabal in order to sour public opinion against androids?

[Gnoman]

It gets wackier when you realize Star Fleet has access to both sentient solid holograms and teleporters (which can replicate living humans no problem.) Androids might be better workers than humans, but if humans wanted slaves they are spoiled for options.

The transporter duplication thing happened only twice - and only one of those produced a duplicate that could survive any length of time. Both happened under extremely unusual circumstances. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the creation of Thomas Riker was a fluke that could not be replicated even if they tried.

[GloatingSwine]

They're not really any different from a biological creature which requires some technology for life support. Humans are also dependent on a hefty technological infrastructure in order to exist in outer space.

The questions raised on ST Voyager about the Doctor's rights as an individual directly echoed those that were raised about Data on ST The Next Generation. While the outcome wasn't as clear cut for the Doctor as it was for Data, at least the future timeline shown in Voyager's finale strongly implies that he eventually does earn full equality under the law.

As for the race of Data's "descendants" on ST Picard, didn't they indicate that the Martian uprising was actually caused by the secret Romulan anti-robots cabal in order to sour public opinion against androids?

Although in that episode (Author, Author) it also showed that the Federation were using EMHs for mining and the Doctor's holonovel was presented as something of a subversive text among them at the end.

As in so many areas, the Federation often talks a big game when it comes to the rights of various forms of life, it doesn't always follow through.

[Lacuna Caster]

—And yet, thirty years on, we see in ST: Picard that this ideal hasn’t exactly been put into practice. More the reverse, since we see exactly what Guinan alluded to: a race of disposable people, doing the work that’s too hazardous for humans to do.

It gets wackier when you realize Star Fleet has access to both sentient solid holograms and teleporters (which can replicate living humans no problem.) Androids might be better workers than humans, but if humans wanted slaves they are spoiled for options.

It would be pretty difficult to nail down any real consistency within Star Trek's technobabble and episode-to-episode plot devices, and the comparison of Data or other sapient AI within the setting to a disposable slave class runs into multiple problems where the analogy breaks down.

* Data is explicitly programmed to be ethical, self-sacrificing, and not glaringly at odds with human notions of etiquette and decorum (he had to be programmed not to walk around naked, for example, because it disturbed the colonists.) Whether conventional human notions of autonomy and self-direction make any sense for a being whose ultimate ambitions and desires in life have been extensively hardwired in advance is highly debatable.

* Data, in any case, would not have to be externally coerced into performing tasks too difficult or dangerous for squishy humans to undertake (the 'dirty work', as it were.) He knows that he is more physically robust than his human colleagues and wishes to protect them from harm (in addition to being able to back up his memories to a safe location, so there's little real risk to him personally.) In pretty much every scenario where dirty work needs to be done, he's going to actively volunteer to do it. I don't know if it's possible to enslave someone for the purpose of doing what they were always going to volunteer for anyway.

* Realistically, the Federation shouldn't really need anyone getting exposed to dirty work regardless- aside from automation replacing most of those roles centuries ago, remote-controlled humanoid drones piloted by humans using holographic interfaces would be similarly productive, and I find it hard to believe the Federation couldn't slap together that kind of technology if they really wanted to. So the question isn't whether the work is dangerous, the question is whether humans find it 'worth their time' or not.

* If it were possible to safely mass-produce sapient machines like Data, their application wouldn't be limited just to jobs that were physically taxing, because in addition to being immortal, self-effacing and vastly physically superior, Data is also intellectually superior- his only weak point is emotional intelligence and social etiquette (even though holodeck AI seems to have no problem with this). It's quite plausible that androids would be better at 90% of all intellectual labour as well as manual labour, and at that point the only thing you need humans for is talking to other humans.

* So in the scenario where you have mass-produced android labour you're not going to see them being assigned to do 'dirty work' (which wouldn't exist, and wouldn't be dangerous for them anyway)- you're going to see mass unemployment of humans more generally.

In short, the reason why the Federation wouldn't roll out mass-produced Datas is because all their citizens would be bored.

.

[Morgaln]

The transporter duplication thing happened only twice - and only one of those produced a duplicate that could survive any length of time. Both happened under extremely unusual circumstances. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the creation of Thomas Riker was a fluke that could not be replicated even if they tried.

There are a number of episodes where they more or less reconstruct a person from the data logged by the transporters (e. g. in Rascals or in Tuvix). Copying data is trivially easy. Replicators are able to produce organic matter. Combine both technologies and it should easily be possible to create duplicates.

[Lacuna Caster]

There are a number of episodes where they more or less reconstruct a person from the data logged by the transporters (e. g. in Rascals or in Tuvix). Copying data is trivially easy. Replicators are able to produce organic matter. Combine both technologies and it should easily be possible to create duplicates.

Yeah, but this is never going to be made canon in-universe because it opens a huge ethical can-of-worms regarding what transporters actually do.

[hamishspence]

Going by tie-in material to the Picard series, Maddox ceased his work on attempting to create "truly sapient androids" when it was discovered that the Romulus star was going to go supernova in a few years - in favour of mass-producing non-sapient androids for labor on building the starships that would carry the Romulan refugees, at Mars. It took quite a bit of work to persuade him too - he disliked the idea of working on non-sapient androids - but the needs of the Romulan civilians demanded it.

Why were androids needed? Because some things cannot be replicated as-is - they have to be assembled - they needed more hands to do the assembling - some things just do need manpower, and the Federation didn't have enough.



Why did they go rogue?

Now, here is where I kind of lose the threadline in Picard.

Either the androids on Mars revolted and fled into space where they were found my Maddox and Soong's son who helped them "evolve" into the andriods from the end of Picard.

OR Maddox and Soong went into the wilderness and made a new, superior, data-like version of the androids who then snuck back to the federation and led the androids on mars in a revolt.

I can't really tell which of those happened, but one of them, or some combination of them did.

Neither:

Spoiler

Show

The secret Romulan anti-'droid cabal, the Zhat Vash, were so obsessed with preventing large-scale android production, of any kind, that they hacked them, to cause the disaster on Mars. They knew that as a result, lots of refugees wouldn't be evacuated - but they decided that the threat androids posed was enough to justify it.

During the scenes of the "revolt" the androids are seen shooting themselves after causing damage - the cabal's way of ensuring that the androids don't get loose after they've done what the Zhat Vash want.


And as a result, all serious research, and any manufacture of androids of any kind, within the Federation, was banned - forcing Maddox to go into hiding when he wanted to begin his old project of sapient androids again.

[Morgaln]

Yeah, but this is never going to be made canon in-universe because it opens a huge ethical can-of-worms regarding what transporters actually do.

Very true, I wasn't suggesting it should ever be canon. I was just pointing out that it should be doable with what we're shown in the show.

[Wintermoot]

Spoiler

Show

The secret Romulan anti-'droid cabal, the Zhat Vash, were so obsessed with preventing large-scale android production, of any kind, that they hacked them, to cause the disaster on Mars. They knew that as a result, lots of refugees wouldn't be evacuated - but they decided that the threat androids posed was enough to justify it.

During the scenes of the "revolt" the androids are seen shooting themselves after causing damage - the cabal's way of ensuring that the androids don't get loose after they've done what the Zhat Vash want.


And as a result, all serious research, and any manufacture of androids of any kind, within the Federation, was banned - forcing Maddox to go into hiding when he wanted to begin his old project of sapient androids again.

Ah yes. Thanks for that. I really enjoyed Picard but, to be honest, it lost me in places and ended up going in and out my ears. Perhaps because of my advanced age and increasing lack of interest in certain narratives. I'd completely forgotten about the romulan plot.

Good ol' Romulans.

[LibraryOgre]

To add to this, consider the episode "Quality of Life" (s6e9) where they discover some robots that have evolved sentience.