I’m not so sure the AI holograms in the simulator are necessarily slaves.
In Star Trek, there was an assumption during the TNG era and continuing to the beginning of Voyager that the holographic beings were not sentient. One cool thing that show did (which didn’t fit into the reset button mentality) was to explore, over time, a holographic doctor who has to stay on for much longer than was ever envisioned, who therefore explores his sentience or develops it (I’m not sure if it’s ever made clear whether he is the first of his kind to become sentient).
And to think, Moriarty was created by a miscommunication with the computer. “Create a character who can defeat Data” (and not the character in the holo-story Data is playing). Apparently all that was required to create the first (?) artificial computer generation holo-person was to ask, and no one had thought to do so before.
I don’t think the holodeck stories were ever worth the stupidity you had to accept in order to watch them from a payoff/suspension of disbelief perspective. In comparison, the Orville is doing a much better job of creating plausible stories around the simulator. Although I thought the one with Alara facing her fears was pretty weak and closer to the bad aspects of how TNG handled them. The other uses of the simulator have been much more elegant.
They are no more slaves than Mario and Luigi or Ms Pac Man are. Or an inflatable doll. They’re just more sophisticated game characters.
My suspension of disbelief assumes that, if you looked close while you where in the room, you could tell it wasn’t real. The room is only so big. Having more than one person in it at a time means they are going to have different perspectives, and medium distance objects (the ones that are father away than the room walls, but closer than “infinity”) are going to be distorted. Think of the hallway simulator in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol. A skillful holoscene creator is going to minimize the possibility of that happening.
Take for example the ST TAS episode where the computer went a little bit crazy and decided to play practical jokes, and locked the crew in the holodeck in a blizzard. Kirk (?) said “no matter what it looks like, it’s just a room. If we walk in one direction long enough, we’ll hit a wall.” Why is the animated series smarter than the live action ones?
If they did have sentience but had no choice but to play their roles then they’d be as unto slaves … Westworld anyone? (Really this stuff has been explored in SF lots.)
The Orville and the Trek universe are pretty consistent in their norms. An intelligent sentient AI is entitled to Free Will (and to the consequences of its choices) commensurate with its degree of those traits, and an intelligent sentient AI with Free Will is a necessary precondition for a non-aberrant human-AI relationship.
FWIW Just Asking Questions I don’t see giving an illusion of walking a distance while not moving any distance to be all that hard for a high tech VR to accomplish.
Yeah, I have no problem with the idea of some sort of omni-directional treadmill made of force fields so that people could travel indefinitely in any direction, and perceive different surface textures and such. However, presumably two people could walk off in opposite directions, and eventually one of them would have to hit a wall, simply because they can’t be 50 feet apart if the holodeck is only 45 feet wide at its longest. Presumably the computer would create some sort of limitations to how far people could be apart, and make it look natural, to sort of guide them back together again. Sort of like the Vive VR headset uses its knowledge of how your room is shaped to guide you away from walls and objects by making them appear as sort of ghostly barrier indicators. It would be a more sophisticated and seamless version of that. And people who grew up in a world with simulators would be used to navigating it without a second thought, it would be a natural limitation to us in the same way that, say, floor-to-ceiling windows are to us. We can see the outside world, but we know that if we keep walking in that direction we’re going to walk right into the window.
But in any case, the simulator wasn’t discovered yesterday. In this universe, we’ve probably been using their version of the simulator and earlier, less sophisticated versions of it for at least decades. People would’ve grown up with an intuitive understanding of how the simulator works, because they’d have had a lot of childhood / development experiences in one. It would be as natural to them as using a keyboard or a game controller to walk around in a virtual world is to us. So I’m willing to assume that some very smart people worked out all the kinks to make these illusions convincing, and came up with some very clever solutions to obvious problems like how you get the people you’re with to perceive the holodeck as one large continuous environment instead of one room, or how to subtly guide people together so that you don’t allow them to get too far apart that the holodeck’s physical room size couldn’t hold them.
I can see an argument for holocharacters being unwitting prisoners, but not really slaves. Look at how Gordon got his heart broken. If he could say “Computer: keep her singing, but have her prefer me”, he had more decency than to try it.
I don’t see the problem. I’m with DSeid on this one. Just have them feel like they are walking further away, and project an image of them as further away. I guess your assumption is that the real people inside the simulator/holodeck have to appear to be where they actually are, with only NPCs and objects simulated?
Ah. I have watched pretty much all of every other Trek series, but probably <20% of TNG. So this understanding about sentience didn’t really catch on by the time of Voyager and the Doctor?
Yes? Special Future Magic to make things look like they are real when they aren’t isn’t the same thing as Special Future Magic that makes things that are really there invisible.
Let’s say you and I are in the holodeck. We walk away from one another for a perceived hundred feet. You turn and look at me.
Who’s to say you’re actually seeing me? You might just be seeing an opaque simulation of me and the landscape, projected at some point between our actual locations and showing me at a distance of a hundred feet. It’s perfectly within the internal logic set out by the nature of a holodeck.
It’s no more making me “invisible” than if I were to walk through a door in the simulation and close it behind me. In both cases, the holodeck is projecting an opaque terrain between me and another user.
The VR system is controlling what is seen and heard. It can make you see a tree where your captain is or see your captain as if he is a thousand feet away. It can make you perceive yourself stretching out like Alice.
I don’t feel that this is the same as the original topic we were discussing though.
We were discussing the possibility of people engaging in romantic relationships with simulated characters and you were suggesting it would remain as unusual, and socially unacceptable, as using sex dolls is today.
I disagreed on that, and I think a full discussion takes us too far off-field (though I am willing to have that discussion in a separate thread).
Essentially the new question is: “On the Orville, are relationships with real people (where Isaac is included as a ‘real person’), shown to be preferable to relationships with virtual / purpose-built characters?”
To that question, sure I would answer “yes”. There’s room for debate on the edges: after all, Claire’s relationship was also though of as bizarre at first. But the crew came to accept it, whereas Gordon’s relationship was always seen as harmful, and at best a dead-end.
So yeah, on this new question I would say the answer is fairly trivially yes.
FWIW I was participating in a discussion triggered by this comment:
My take remains that The Orville and the Trek universes do not “understate” the impact at all:
Instead a belief that so many would use the holodeck for romantic fantasies and sex that it would displace real relationships is far overstated. It would be viewed no differently than masturbating to porn, which may now be more normalized as something to do but which is not normalized as something to do in preference to real relationships with less idealized people. Or I’d think experienced by most as something that satisfies quite the same way.
The differences between how society would view those who spend an inordinate amount of time in the holodeck for porn while they avoid real relationships (as Bortus was doing), and preferred relationships that include sex with an intelligent, sentient AI that has Free Will to the same degree we do (Claire and Issac), are, I think, handled reasonably well in-universe.
But when I was talking about understating the impact, that was in the more general context than just romantic relationships.
I doubt that the holodeck would just be used occasionally as a leisure activity like laser quest.
e.g. A perfect vivid-VR could be useful as an actual shared working environment; not just to generate a more pleasant, daylight environment but also project a lot of useful information and allow very natural input.
And “workspace” is just one of many uses.
However, I am not complaining that shows like this understate the potential impact of a holodeck.
It would be a confusing and difficult to relate to show if people spent too much time in VR or AR.
Even writing stories set in the present day, with people spending much of their time online, is often difficult, and many shows and movies pretty much pretend the internet and smartphones don’t exist (or do the classic: everyone’s phone has no signal) so they can use some standard dramatic conventions.
This is an interesting point to bring us back on topic.
I would say Isaac is fully sentient / sapient / conscious as demonstrated by him choosing to rescue Ty (I’ll choose not the use the term “free will” as of course many would dispute anyone has free will).
However, that was long past the point where most of the crew had accepted his relationship with Claire.
At the point where they were accepted, had Isaac demonstrated consciousness?
One of the things I liked was that the show kept this somewhat ambiguous for a long time.