and so far inferior that they had no rights which the was bound to respect." And this, as I said, was despite the fact that this wasn't J. They came -> <- this close to another Dred Scott decision holding that androids are "beings of an inferior order. They go around and around before Guinan points out what was obvious to me: it's like slavery all over again.
STAR TREK THE MEASURE OF A MAN SERIES
But that's my point - that having been established long before the series began, they still have to consider whether Data has the right to choose not to be damaged by a scientist who thinks he might learn something cool. User:Kchishol1970 Well, the Borg might be capable of such a leap. :-) More seriously, I don't remember anyone refusing to accept Data as a sapient being. What I like to say is that the episode, The Best of Both Worlds showed the willingness of the characters to defend the Federation, but The Measure of a Man showed why the Federation is worth defending. In the Star Trek universe, only the Federation is shown as capable of making such a leap of a moral imagination to conclude that a artificially intelligent machine of Data's sophistication is in effect a sentient being. I see this episode as presenting the clearest picture of the best nature of the Federation. It raised the question of whether a commissioned officer in Starfleet could be vivisected against his will, and then took most of an hour to figure out the answer. This episode is one of several which painted a bleak picture of the state of civil rights in the Federation - inadvertantly, I presume. Will the sex holograms that are in Quark's be considered people too? Fentoro 05:07, 10 March 2007 (UTC) Isn't this a tad bit of a fictional slippery slope? The Doctor in voyager was labled a human too. Rabbi Ashkanazi's answer, by the way, was "no", based on some technicalities in the rules governing minyans. Considered by itself, the question seems silly, but what is really being asked is "Is an artificially created intelligent being really human?" That has been a recurring question in speculative fiction ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and would become a very real question if we were to develop an artificial intelligence that could pass the Turing Test. This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.Ī late 17th-early 18th century rabbi, Zvi Ashkanazi, asked "Can a golem be a member of a minyan?" A golem is an artificially created intelligent life form, and a minyan is ten or more adult male Jews gathered for prayer. This article has been rated as C-Class on the project's quality scale. Science Fiction Wikipedia:WikiProject Science Fiction Template:WikiProject Science Fiction science fiction articles If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
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