Kai has no goals or cares of his own, frequently making such comments as “the dead do not want anything”, and “the dead do not have opinions”. He mostly does as he’s asked, but for the most part, he just doesn’t care about anything one way or another.
The way Kai is described certainly matches what an unemotional and goalless yet powerfully rational creature would be. Yet somehow, the authors manage to slip in a remarkable amount of goal direction and ‘caring’. We just can’t help but assume that amoral, inhuman creatures would take on human characteristics if we socialised them enough.
Emotionless (in the normal sense of the word), maybe. Goalless, no. What defines the decisions to follow requests? What defines the specific manner in which they are followed? How is your request to be understood? These all depend on how the agent in question sees the world, and on its preference to act this way and not another. The goal-less agent is not an apathetic zombie servant, but a rock.
The way Kai is described certainly matches what an unemotional and goalless yet powerfully rational creature would be. Yet somehow, the authors manage to slip in a remarkable amount of goal direction and ‘caring’. We just can’t help but assume that amoral, inhuman creatures would take on human characteristics if we socialised them enough.
Emotionless (in the normal sense of the word), maybe. Goalless, no. What defines the decisions to follow requests? What defines the specific manner in which they are followed? How is your request to be understood? These all depend on how the agent in question sees the world, and on its preference to act this way and not another. The goal-less agent is not an apathetic zombie servant, but a rock.
Right—that’s why I said Kai was merely an improvement on Spock, not that he was an accurate model.