Episode 9, Season 2 of Star Trek, the Next Generation, posits a situation in which Star Fleet has ordered Data to be disassembled in order to analyze his construction. Data objects-- I don't know why he would-- he's a robot-- and a "hearing" is held. Picard defends Data against this contemptuous act: Data is more than a machine. He must have a soul. He is my friend.
Picard is obviously getting a little soft in the head.
Some fans of the series expressed sheer joy in the celebration of Data's "right" to exercise choice as a... a what? Nobody goes into detail because the idea, as charming as it is to them, is absurd. As a machine?
Picard defends Data as being "self-aware" and "intelligent", and he claims that no one can prove that Data does not have consciousness. The straw man opposition, Bruce Maddox, stunningly can't remember what a robot is or what the difference is between a mechanism and a biological organism. He can't, apparently, even define "consciousness". When Picard asks Data to explain why he is at the hearing, the scene cries out-- nay, screams-- for Maddox to point out that Data is doing absolutely nothing more than following his programming instructions. As sophisticated as they might be, it is still nothing more than software.
If Rodenberry had wanted to make the episode at least a little challenging, he might have tried to argue that Data has so many circuits and so many programming instructions that the collective result of all those 1's and 0's is similar to human consciousness, but then Maddox could have replied that Picard was being reductionist on the human side, and, if the writer had the gift of eloquence, Maddox could have waxed poetic about human will, love, the pleasure of companionship, the reverence for beauty, and so on.
But, as I said, that's why I couldn't stand Star Trek TNG, and that's why the movie also sucked.
It could also have been funny. Maddox could have asked Data a number of weird questions, and then submitted a list to the court showing that he knew all of the answers Data would give in advance. Because Data is not and could never be anything more than the sum of his hardware and his programming. Data could be shown the unicorn, as Deckard was in "Blade Runner", a deeply profound film about something like robots.
But then, Picard would find a bug in the code and interpret that as "personality".
The other point Maddox could have made is that there could reasonably be another Data, or a million Datas, a point Picard inadvertently makes (but then he calls it a "race"). Each of the Datas-- a point glaringly and ridiculously ignored at the hearing-- would be absolutely identical.
Now we enter absurdity. Picard asserts that it is a measure of the quality of humans as humans how they will treat machines like Data. This should be comical, but it is dramatized with morbid reverence as if a great philosophical point is being made. Picard even refers to Data as "new life", as in "seek out new life forms".
Again, it's really like Picard is talking about a laptop or an iphone here.
Just imagine for a moment if, instead of a rather creepy looking android, the machine was represented by an Apple laptop instead.
Well, really, aside from a larger number of circuits, is there any difference?
Why can't robots ever have feelings? It's oddly akin to the idea that you can't know what you don't know-- there is no way a robot can "want" to have anything. It can only execute its programs. Data might have had an objective all right-- but it would have been in the nature of an embedded command to preserve his mechanical and functional integrity. His first question might have been, "Have I been superseded by an upgraded model? All right then, I will take myself to the dump...."
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Why is the idea that a robot would want to be human so attractive to people? Is it a totally narcissistic impulse-- we are so fabulous at everything that all other sentient beings-- even objects-- want to be us? Or is it because we identify with the robot-- because deep down in our dead souls we too want to be human.
I believe Star Trek: The Next Generation would have been far, far more interesting if Data behaved more like a real robot: cold-blooded, ruthless, efficient. The humans around him would be terrified because he would be the only crew member capable of making a truly rational decision.
There would be another fear-- the fear that his programmer made a mistake somewhere in those zillions of lines of code, and Data hits the self-destruct button when they're stopping to refuel.
