For six decades, Star Trek has presented the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence, and this chapter treats the franchise as a continuous argument concerning which entities should be counted. It starts with the cybernetic legacy common to Wiener and Turing, both of whom regarded the distinction between animals and machines as irrelevant when it came to questions of control and communication, and then goes on to "The Measure of a Man", in which a Starfleet court determines Data's per…
Read moreFor six decades, Star Trek has presented the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence, and this chapter treats the franchise as a continuous argument concerning which entities should be counted. It starts with the cybernetic legacy common to Wiener and Turing, both of whom regarded the distinction between animals and machines as irrelevant when it came to questions of control and communication, and then goes on to "The Measure of a Man", in which a Starfleet court determines Data's personhood even though it is unable to define the concept it is applying. Searle's Chinese Room provides the main objection; Picard's defense in response is that uncertainty about consciousness creates an obligation to recognize that consciousness exists. The chapter then traces the question through the case of emergent sentience in "Elementary, Dear Data", issues of parenthood and property in "The Offspring", questions of authorship and self-representation in "Author, Author" and "Living Witness", where narrativist views of identity explain the Doctor's request to alter the historical record regarding himself, and the problems in "The Ultimate Computer" and "Prototype", when read in conjunction with Russell's work on control. Data, the Doctor, Seven of Nine, and the genetically enhanced characters from Deep Space Nine and Strange New Worlds all serve as examples of what shared citizenship with artificial and enhanced beings would require of the institutions that grant it.
