I’m a part-time Trek fan, but I must’ve missed some episodes or movies. After Data and his brother, what happened in the universe that made something like the Emergency Medical Hologram possible? How come he’s so much more advanced than Data ever was, especially in his ability to emphasize with humans? Is there any Borg in him?
I was going to posit that Data empathizes with humans better than The Doc from the moment we see him. But Data seems to be programmed to do so rather than feeling actual empathy, and then we get into how Data is more than the sum of his parts…and that just opens up a big metaphysical can o worms.
Also, Data could have been programmed with emotions but Soong was afraid he’d go bad like Lore did.
Voyager’s EMH was an artifact of being left on for so long, thereby expanding the default programming. The empathy isn’t there when we first see him; he’s much more abrupt and abrasive. Somebody who didn’t like Dr. Lewis Zimmerman much, the creator of the EMH program and in whose likeness the first EMHs were made, gave all of them an unlikable personality as a prank.
With the introduction of the EMH Mk. Two, Mk. Ones were relegated to manual labor. We saw one mining camp populated entirely by Ones and Voyager’s EMH did not recognize himself in them.
My fanwank is that in the Star Trek: TNG episode featuring the Bynars, they upgraded the Enterprise’s holodeck to be able to generate a true meta-intelligence rather than just programmed simulacrums. That the Federation can duplicate the upgrades even though they don’t entirely understand how they work. Plus, it was established on Voyager that holograms suffer from long-term stability problems, and the Doctor was the result of running the EMH program far longer than anyone thought was possible.
Basically the EMH was programmed by an eccentric doctor named Dr. Zimmerman. It’s been to long since I watched the show to remember if he or his superiors decided to make the EMH empathetic. I do remember an episode were they explain that the doctor’s program was evolving due to being left running for so long. I love the one scene were he wonders why he turns into Dr. Mengle every time his moral programming is turned off.
There was a book that explained that he was programmed with the basic personalities of a number of famous Star Trek doctors. Kirk of course orders him to transform into Bones.
EDIT: What they said.
I also think that Voyager’s “Bioneural” circuitry factored into this somehow, even though this was never stated.
I’m sure there’s some time travel involved. That story line with Ed Begley gave the EMH some unexpected capabilities.
I think time travel screwups need to be Rule One for explaining oddities in Star Trek plots.
I agree with gotpasswords. I am certain that the doctor was augmented with future tech.
ETA: At the very least the future tech allowed him to move around freely. He wasn’t confined to sick bay or the holodeck.
Nicely done! I’ll throw in the suggestion that someone in Starfleet tried to integrate Professor Moriarty’s self-awareness into the mix.
Long time, deeply rooted Star trek fan here. Not bashing the show as an non-fan…
ST always seems to need an outsider looking in. In TOS it was Spock, a half-human half-alien. In TNG it was Data, the android Pinocchio. IN DS9 it was Odo, the alien with no memory of where he came from.
In Voyager, they didn’t want to repeat themselves, but were running out of ideas. Someone must have seen the Moriarty episode of TNG, and ran with it. But Moriarty was a fluke. So they just hand-waved advanced capabilities into the EMH, I don’t think the state of the art in Voyager’s time would support the EMH, but they liked the character. So technobble is the answer. And as for the mobile emitter - a Wizard did it.
And putting EMHs in mines? That doesn’t even make sense! The infrastructure that must be in place that allows EMHs to manipulate solid matter would have to be immense. Something you would only install in a limited, controlled environment like a sickbay. Some force field must be manipulating those tools, instruments, limbs, whatever, and if you have that tech in a mine, just make simple programs to move rock. It’s not rocket science, just rock science.
A wizard didn’t do the mobile emitter; they got it from a crashed 26th-century time travel ship with the help of Sarah Silverman.
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
All the holograms in TNG-era Trek were more advanced than Data, a point which is just ignored in most episodes.
Personally, I think it works much better when viewed through a fantasy lens rather than SF. Holograms are called from the spirit world for humans’ amusement, and everyone in fantasy knows that getting amusement from the spirits is dangerous (but they do it anyway). Data, however, is a golem, not a spirit, and crafting a golem is much more difficult than binding a spirit, which is what makes Data unique.
That makes sense.
Is Q a trickster, like Loki?
Why would anyone expect Data to be more advanced than the Holograms? Everything that Data was (Processor, Memory, Sensors) had to be contained in his human sized body. The Holograms had the resources of the entire ship to draw on. Not knocking the positronic brain, but I don’t see how it could out perform the computer that ran a starship.
Agreed. They would need mobile emitters for ALL the EMHs to make that feasible.
Poor Starfleet, every time they think they’ve made good slaves, they accidentally create sentient life.
Except that the holodeck is the primary form of entertainment for most of the crew, and each person’s holoshows will feature multiple simulacra. I can maybe buy the ship’s computers simulating one AI better than Data, but hundreds at once, and just for the fun of it? And that’s not even getting into the issue of persistence: Data has had years to develop his personality, while hologram simulacra are turned on and off at a whim.
Perhaps more Loge from the Wagner ring cycle.
I think he is a good guy towards humans, despite his ridicule.
He warns them about the Borg, somehow does something with Picard and the woman in the Robin Hood episode.
He comes to the humans for help when he is kicked out of the Q, and when he fights the rest of the Q over something on other. He causes Picard to correct an error in the episode where Picard is time traveling.
Perhaps he wants humans to succeed on their own, so he treats them contemptuously.
I’m not as familiar with Voyager as I am with other series, but I would suggest that Federation was on the cusp of commonplace artificial sentience in the TNG period, and its technology was not stagnant.
Dr. Soong was, of course, a pioneer–but Data had been known to Federation society for ~20 years when the series started. Information on his design was included in textbooks. No one had succeeded in duplicating the results, but bear in mind that he was also self-contained; shipboard computers, which hosted the hologram programs, were much larger–the Enterprise D’s computer had enough capacity to handle the data and functions of the Bynar’s planetary computer.
The Bynar’s modifications showed that the holoprograms could be enhanced considerably; no doubt Federation computer scientists followed up on this and used what they learned to make improvements of their own. It’s likely that the holodecks, along with other ship software, received regular updates, reflected in their increasing capabilities–and bugginess. The accidental creation of the Moriarty program is a case in point for both. It seemed clear at that point that, given sufficient resources and the right conditions, it was possible for sentience (or something indistinguishable from it) to arise. This, too, was undoubtedly noted with interest.
The EMH was at attempt at applying the knowledge gained from Data, the Bynars, and various holodeck incidents, but–mindful of the near-disasters those incidents had caused–it was constrained. It was designed to learn and expand its programming in some ways, but circumstances pushed this feature beyond its initial scope. In particular, specific efforts were made to improve the program’s ability to interact with the crew. (Whereas Data’s emotional capacities were deliberately curtailed.) Experience acquired through unintended long-term operation, the frequent addition of new modules, and increased access to computing and informational resources conspired to awaken the program from borderline sentience to true awareness.
In essence, by the time of Voyager, every large ship’s computer is a potential host to synthetic sentience. Most are just not given the necessary push to wake up.
I argue that he’s more like Coyote.
Imagine I came in on the first reply post and made all the good points everyone has made in this thread.
See? THAT’S the beauty of Time Travel!