In this episode, Tom Paris has created a holodeck scenario involving an idealized 19th-century Irish village. Captain Janeway meets an interesting man there, a bartender named Michael Sullivan. They don’t have much in common, but she’s intrigued by him. He’s married. In the episode, she changes his personality and appearance, deletes the wife, and does little things to make him more attractive to herself.
You know, the same old story. “Girl meets boy, girl modifies boy’s subroutines.”
At which point did she go too far?
In the original poll, a full 50% of respondents said that their answer was more nuanced than any of the existing poll answers. I’m particularly curious about that.
Sounds to me like a 24th century version of fan fiction. The original program is still accessible, isn’t it? Heck, it’s not that different (in that the plot point of the episode seems to be rewriting the original work) from a movie or TV show where the solution was to rewrite the story so the real humans could escape the story. (BTW, what was that film?)
I’ve never watched ST:V, but from what I’ve read of holodeck simulations, and her actions as you have described them, it doesn’t seem to me that she went too far at any point.* It’s not like she manipulated the reality of a living, sentient entity. The holodeck simulations (in my uninformed opinion) are essentially glorified sex toys.
Feel free to educate me and change my mind (warning: I’m an unreconstructed bio-speciesist who considers Commander Data to be an “it,” so it might be a hard slog).
( <---- why isn’t that an asterisk?)
There’s an argument to be made that when she did whatever she did that landed her ship in the Delta Quadrant, she went too far.
No; all these changes are assumed to be permanent. She could even have deleted his snoring, if she wanted to. When she realized that, she left for a time, and broke Michael’s heart.
The Doctor certainly isn’t. He’s a valued member of the crew, just one made from photons and forcefields. Just as Data is a sentient being, which was a distinction fought hard for in a JAG court.
Star Trek is too inconsistent about what it takes to create an AI. We’re told that Data is a remarkable and unique creation, impossible to replicate, but then the Enterprise turns hologram Moriarty into a sentient program because Geordi wants to play a fun game.
If the holodeck is capable of making sentient AI whenever it wants, then using it for entertainment is inherently unethical. If Michael Sullivan just represents a very complex but ultimately unintelligent video game, then nothing you can do to it is unethical.
I had to go check which episode this was, as there are two episodes with this program. But it’s only in the second (“Spirit Folk”) where they argu ably become self aware, and thus possibly count as actual people. Right now, they’re just typical Holodeck characters, essentially like more advanced video game characters.
Given that, I agree that at no point in the episode did Janeway violate any moral principles. But that isn’t her issue. Her issue is that she feels like she’s falling in love with a fictional character, and she’s not sure if that’s a good thing. The ending has her decide that there’s nothing wrong with that, but that it would be a less realistic experience if she can just modify the program every time she’s unhappy. She decides that she’d rather have to deal with the inevitable conflicts naturally, rather than use a cheat code to override them.
So, while she never went too far morally, she did decide that any further modifications were too far for her own preferences.
You just made me remember there was one episode of ST:V in which the Doctor was put on trial or was to be put on trial because the society on one planet considered holograms such as the Doctor to be sentient beings.
Assuming the character is non-sentient, I don’t see any issue with modifications. The only ones I can see is the issue with copyright and perhaps stepping on toes. We don’t know how copyright is handled in ST if at all. It could be assumed that user modification is not only allowed but a feature that the user is expected to do. And perhaps that’s the expectations in society. So there is not enough information to tell.
I just work from the assumption that the holodeck works by invoking fey creatures from the spirit realm. It’s a heck of a lot more consistent than the technobabble that they use to try to justify it. And some of those fey spirits are distinctly unseelie.
Heck, the Original Series had three episodes I can think of with androids at least as sophisticated as Data, possibly more so (“What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “I, Mudd,” and “Requiem for Methuselah”). Granted, in all of those cases the androids were creations of advanced beings or civilizations, rather than ordinary human scientists. Nevertheless, androids of sufficient sophistication as to possibly qualify as “alive” were not so rare a thing in the universe as TNG wanted us to believe.
Another vote for “never went too far”. It’s a computer program, not a real person.
I would even say Barclay didn’t go too far in making the “Goddess of Empathy” and Riker a pie-eating short oaf. Though this so-called enlightened 24th century should have better privacy protection. Having sex with a holodeck character copy of Deanna or Picard or whoever is really no different than jerking off thinking about them. It’s still objectifying a real person, and maybe one should analyze one’s feelings as to why they think this is a good idea. Maybe they should talk to Deanna. But it should be private!
The shows go too far in this “enlightenment”, that the characters seem to treat every thing as a sentient being. Holodeck characters, even Moriarty, are not sentient! Moriarty just does a very good job of emulating sentience. Of course it says “I feel sad, you locked me in a room for years.” It’s programmed to say things like that. Someone with a bit more of a big-picture view, like Q, would be laughing at Picard. “Isn’t that cute! You gave your toaster a little friend! And a comfy pillow. It’s touching.”
The problem with Janeway isn’t that she “altered the parameters” of her boyfriend, it’s that she fell in love with her (very sophisticated) dildo.
If Kirk could change the Kobayashi Maru simulation, an official Academy training exercise, and not only not get kicked out but get a citation for original thinking, then there’s literally nothing Janeway could do that goes too far, short of programming the holodeck to murder.
In the novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk said the trainer didn’t know whether to bust a gut laughing or blow a gasket, and he thinks he ultimately flipped a coin.
In the alternate universe, in Star Trek (2009), Kirk got put on academic probation for this stunt and was grounded from active starship duty. McCoy needed to simulate him being ill and use a technicality to get him onboard the Enterprise.
In the novel Kobayashi Maru, Kirk got 99 demerits, one shy of the expulsion limit, for what he did. (I already know what you’re going to say. Novels aren’t canon either. But we’re never going to see an onscreen prime-universe Kirk dealing with the Kobayashi Maru, so this is as good as we’re going to get.)
But it should be private!