FWIW, that was only Picard’s answer: definitive, as befits a ship’s captain. The judge’s answer was that they were not equipped to make such a determination, and in the face of that uncertainty, the right choice was to defer to Data himself to explore it. They also did a very similar episode in Voyager regarding whether the captain or crew had the right to edit the memories of the holographic doctor, with basically the same conclusion.
I think questions of AI moral personhood will also, for some people, force us to really confront what we claim are our opinions regarding the use of violent or deadly force. It makes a lot of the implicit and unexamined value determinations, that we all make all the time, explicit and scary, The Good Place-style.
There’s a part of me that suspects we (collectively, not individually) may not really grapple with digital personhood until we learn how to store human minds in digital form (assuming such a thing happen in our timeline). If those two teddy bears were not AIs, but the devices that stored your grandparents, or a thousand strangers, well, then what?
FWIW, that was only Picard’s answer: definitive, as befits a ship’s captain. The judge’s answer was that they were not equipped to make such a determination, and in the face of that uncertainty, the right choice was to defer to Data himself to explore it. They also did a very similar episode in Voyager regarding whether the captain or crew had the right to edit the memories of the holographic doctor, with basically the same conclusion.
I think questions of AI moral personhood will also, for some people, force us to really confront what we claim are our opinions regarding the use of violent or deadly force. It makes a lot of the implicit and unexamined value determinations, that we all make all the time, explicit and scary, The Good Place-style.
There’s a part of me that suspects we (collectively, not individually) may not really grapple with digital personhood until we learn how to store human minds in digital form (assuming such a thing happen in our timeline). If those two teddy bears were not AIs, but the devices that stored your grandparents, or a thousand strangers, well, then what?