I just got to the TNG episode in which Data tries to #discourse his way out of being kidnapped.
What I don’t understand is why the episode tries to end on an ambiguous “Oooh, did Data LIE about attempting to shoot the villain?!”
Was it… implied at some point that Data couldn’t lie…? Whatever mysterious dramatic tension they were going for is lost on me.
I thought the point was supposed to be less about whether Data lied and more about whether he was actually intending to shoot the guy. so it’s less “did Data lie” and more “did Data fully make and go through with the decision to take a man’s life, something one could argue was justified in the situation but would be a notable act for someone who values life so highly”.
buuuuuuut I could be wrong. it’s been ages since I’ve seen that episode.
At the beginning of the episode he directly states that he’s programmed to “use deadly force in the course of defense”, which he clarifies as being distinct from murder. The villain then kills an innocent and threatens to kill others… establishing himself as a ruthless murderer and actively dangerous to other life forms across the galaxy, even mortally endangering an entire planet just to acquire Data. Using “deadly force” against him seems to me a very straightforward and completely logical act of defense, especially given that Data had no other means of subduing him before then… maybe I’m missing something? It seems like the only possible moral ambiguity in the situation would have been the emotional turmoil of killing someone. Hell, I overthink and angst about the moral implications of stepping on ants and I would have killed Fajo out of pure, practical necessity… no rage needed.
It just seemed to me like such a cut-and-dry “this is a circumstance in which killing out of defense is justified and necessary” that making it ambiguous as to whether someone programmed to be able to use lethal force in that situation tried to use it… doesn’t make sense to me?
I mean, I kinda read it a little bit as a combination of a couple of those things. Like, You’re right, if he did decide, through absolute logic, that there was no other solution than to kill him, then he should be able to explain that fully to Riker.
Considering he didn’t though, the question comes why would he lie (assuming it wasn’t a malfunction like he said) Which could put…..some form of motivation behind Data’s actions, maybe even hatred towards the man who’d kidnapped him, humiliated him, and murdered the only person who’d tried to help him. The question comes in as to whether Data’s capable of that kind of….distaste for a person.
There’s also the fact that the weapon he was using wasn’t one of Starfleet’s fancy phasers designed specifically to cause the least amount of pain possible, but a horrific weapon designed to kill slowly. Even if he was willing to kill under necessary circumstances, thats not necessarily the same thing as a torturous death.
But thats just my reading. I watched it….a few weeks ago so I sort of remember things but not in explicit detail.
This is why Data’s characterization in early TNG is so frustrating to me. I’m of the mind that he DID have emotions without the emotion chip, just muted ones he didn’t necessarily recognize as such because they did not fully resemble human emotions. Later seasons kind of retconned his subtle android feelings to focus on the chip as the only possible source of his emotion. It’s way more interesting to me to watch an episode like this and think, yeah, he’s feeling Some Kind of Way and isn’t really aware of it.
There was a line I heard talked about recently, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
The kid asks the Cyborg whether they feel pain when they get hurt. They respond back “I have sensors to indicate when I am damaged.”
And I’ve really been thinking of how that’s different. Because clearly pain serves that purpose in a human, but pain can also cause fear and panic, two very distinctly traditionally animalistic behaviors.
Which made me wonder, more so than if robots can feel pain, but if robots can experience fear or overwhelming anxiety. Is a DDOS attack the same as causing a mental breakdown?
Fear also serves a purpose in humans, if you think of it as an internal alarm going off. What is fear but the result of different sensors saying “ALERT! Something is wrong! Divert energy and attention to the problem!” We’ve just got some design flaws that occasionally result in alerts going off unnecessarily or interfering with our ability to appropriately identify and address the problem. We have lots of useful subroutines meant to help us avoid becoming damaged, and overriding them with specialized programming is not easy, especially when our CPU usage is high and we have a lot of background programs running.