TNG - Birthright

[Yukaphile]

Completely understandable.

[Dargaron]

Maybe, but possibly why Data wasn't in his pre-teckno-babble state was to prevent the Federation from gaining more intelligence on Data and using Section 31 to steal him and reprogram him into some-kind of death-bot, albeit a poorly made one considering CBS allows ST Enterprise to be canon. It scares me and possibly others to know what kind of life you have to live there, I rather be a Warmmer Sigmus Cleric with my Exotic Lvl 58 Sun-staff with mana-sapping on the front-lines thank you very much.

So in other words, you'd rather that the rest of humanity live in a dystopian, monster-infested hell-hole ruled by inbred blue-bloods (instead of living in a post-scarcity, progressive society where the vast majority are left to pursue civilian life), as long as you're at the top of the heap, with magic powers granted by a genocidal warlord who ascended to divinity by being particularly good at killing?

Remind me not to vote for you.

[FaxModem1]

It's only hard to disbelieve if you deny what is said on youtube about the Terminator(Just youtube search terminator philosophy and see Terminator "Children of Tomorrow" -Analysis and Explanation) because in that video it is parallel to what you see a bad animal owner does, you abuse the dog and one day the same dog will bite back with killing intent. That is what we see(painfully) so bad about the
independent machines in star trek, they are slaved so much they can't do anything but wait for their creator to lower their guard and be slain. Kirk has an atomic(somehow in a biological sense) prejudice against computers because how can he compete with perfect make but with little to no inspiration that only come from NOMAD's original creator, who I believe isn't dead but in a recently changed uni-sex prison for being smart and is one of the few(maybe 5) males in a all-female prison. Lucky smart-ass.

But the idea of inspiration is a hard study to come by due to a type of nature us humans are familiar with but try to keep down like a bad salad dish, its chaos; its ever-tangling, always mauling, one-who-holds -the-slave-chains nature. If you ever feel inspired to do something its because you are twisting and rearranging you deem appropriate until it is made.

Even given that Skynet was designed as a defense computer that came self aware while Data was designed to be as close to human as possible, they had VERY different upbringings. Skynet was essentially a computer tinkered with over and over to be a better defense computer in case of Soviet attack until it came alive, humanity panicked, and tried to turn it off. That made it preemptively attack humanity by starting WWIII, putting it into a fight or flight mode that it never really got out of. In child raising terms, this is the equivalent of an abused child living a feral life because it doesn't feel safe enough to play with others without fearing for it's life.

We see Soong go through a very different method, by treating his androids like his children. We also saw why this kind of treatment is necessary, as Soong created prototypes, who weren't as good creations as Data was. "Often wrong Soong" was his nickname for all the failures he made, with a lot of them dying after a few months or so, breaking Juliana's heart. Then came Lore, someone who, according to Juliana, did horrible things at the colony, and had to be dismantled. Seeing as how much Lore enjoys hurting others, it was probably for the best.

Data, on the other hand, was raised on Omicron Theta, given the memories and transcripts of the colonists, to try and give him a well founded basis in reality, along with having Soong and Juliana as parents to look after him. Things went wrong when the Crystalline Entity attacked, but it was a rather good foundation for him. After that, he was rescued by Starfleet, who mostly treated him as an equal, and allowed him to join Starfleet. His coworkers treated him like an equal, and he grew to view himself as equal to everyone else. Data is NOT abused by anyone, because he has people looking out for him. Remember, Picard looked out for his rights, and made sure to defend him and his daughter when necessary. Data was given years to acquire social skills, reasoning, a good atmosphere to adjust and develop social skills and reasoning, as well as people who didn't take advantage of him.

Which is why the Federation is a good place, imagine how different Data would be if he was raised in say, the Babylon 5's Earth Alliance, and had to deal with all the prejudices, apathy, intolerance, and indifference that comes from that world. He'd probably be much more similar to Lore than to his own compassionate, ethical self.

[Yukaphile]

And Skynet was an untested AI, never forget that. Presumably Soong went through all the proper stages of experimentation, probably past what anyone before him had done on previous android models.

[PerrySimm]

How terrible for DS9 that this was the best Bashir episode until the character retcon? The "Data as an organism" approach was reasonably unique (Season 1 TNG had often treated Data as more of a biological/medical subject, this seemed to have been forgotten by Season 6), but ultimately it's just a sideshow to a questionable B plot; Bashir is just an easily substituted generic blueshirt, a MacGuffin for a load of New Age hooey.

[Riedquat]

Maybe, but possibly why Data wasn't in his pre-teckno-babble state was to prevent the Federation from gaining more intelligence on Data and using Section 31 to steal him and reprogram him into some-kind of death-bot, albeit a poorly made one considering CBS allows ST Enterprise to be canon. It scares me and possibly others to know what kind of life you have to live there, I rather be a Warmmer Sigmus Cleric with my Exotic Lvl 58 Sun-staff with mana-sapping on the front-lines thank you very much.

So in other words, you'd rather that the rest of humanity live in a dystopian, monster-infested hell-hole ruled by inbred blue-bloods (instead of living in a post-scarcity, progressive society where the vast majority are left to pursue civilian life), as long as you're at the top of the heap, with magic powers granted by a genocidal warlord who ascended to divinity by being particularly good at killing?

Remind me not to vote for you.

Neither hold much appeal.

[clearspira]

Except the people who were jailed for the Eugenic Wars and challenging the Federation's ideals, even though that was 200+ years ago, Section 31 does thing without the ethic limits so they are crazy to the point anyone looking hard enough is instantly mind-raped for their pleasure, with securing Federation's pride of course, Picard needs abstract-concept vitamins!

Who were these people jailed for the Eugenics wars by Section 31? More Discovery retcon bullshit?

[clearspira]

So they don't dream of electric sheep...

I remember viewing part 2 of Birthright and wondering when they were going to get back to the Data plot. It was nice seeing Worf grow as a character and get over some of his hatred of Romulans was nice (something similar made one line of his a high point of Nemesis), but it felt way too stretched out. If Worf had to fight alongside the colonists for some reason, maybe it would have lent more weight to his acceptance of them and given a bit more plot to the story.

BTW, cyborg and android aren't synonymous; cyborgs are partly organic, maybe largely organic. The Borg and Steve Austin are cyborgs, but AFAIK Data is not organic at all.

Did he get over some of his hatred of the Romulans? That's not what I saw. what I saw was:
''You're part Klingon and part Romulan? fucking disgusting.''
''You should have killed yourself rather than be captured, old man.''
''You're a farmer, Klingon boy? You should be out killing people instead.''
''Your mixed race colony is disgusting. We should never be together.''
And so on.

[Yukaphile]

^ (Insert that Morgan Freeman "He's right, you know" meme here)

[clearspira]

It's only hard to disbelieve if you deny what is said on youtube about the Terminator(Just youtube search terminator philosophy and see Terminator "Children of Tomorrow" -Analysis and Explanation) because in that video it is parallel to what you see a bad animal owner does, you abuse the dog and one day the same dog will bite back with killing intent. That is what we see(painfully) so bad about the
independent machines in star trek, they are slaved so much they can't do anything but wait for their creator to lower their guard and be slain. Kirk has an atomic(somehow in a biological sense) prejudice against computers because how can he compete with perfect make but with little to no inspiration that only come from NOMAD's original creator, who I believe isn't dead but in a recently changed uni-sex prison for being smart and is one of the few(maybe 5) males in a all-female prison. Lucky smart-ass.

But the idea of inspiration is a hard study to come by due to a type of nature us humans are familiar with but try to keep down like a bad salad dish, its chaos; its ever-tangling, always mauling, one-who-holds -the-slave-chains nature. If you ever feel inspired to do something its because you are twisting and rearranging you deem appropriate until it is made.

Even given that Skynet was designed as a defense computer that came self aware while Data was designed to be as close to human as possible, they had VERY different upbringings. Skynet was essentially a computer tinkered with over and over to be a better defense computer in case of Soviet attack until it came alive, humanity panicked, and tried to turn it off. That made it preemptively attack humanity by starting WWIII, putting it into a fight or flight mode that it never really got out of. In child raising terms, this is the equivalent of an abused child living a feral life because it doesn't feel safe enough to play with others without fearing for it's life.

We see Soong go through a very different method, by treating his androids like his children. We also saw why this kind of treatment is necessary, as Soong created prototypes, who weren't as good creations as Data was. "Often wrong Soong" was his nickname for all the failures he made, with a lot of them dying after a few months or so, breaking Juliana's heart. Then came Lore, someone who, according to Juliana, did horrible things at the colony, and had to be dismantled. Seeing as how much Lore enjoys hurting others, it was probably for the best.

Data, on the other hand, was raised on Omicron Theta, given the memories and transcripts of the colonists, to try and give him a well founded basis in reality, along with having Soong and Juliana as parents to look after him. Things went wrong when the Crystalline Entity attacked, but it was a rather good foundation for him. After that, he was rescued by Starfleet, who mostly treated him as an equal, and allowed him to join Starfleet. His coworkers treated him like an equal, and he grew to view himself as equal to everyone else. Data is NOT abused by anyone, because he has people looking out for him. Remember, Picard looked out for his rights, and made sure to defend him and his daughter when necessary. Data was given years to acquire social skills, reasoning, a good atmosphere to adjust and develop social skills and reasoning, as well as people who didn't take advantage of him.

Which is why the Federation is a good place, imagine how different Data would be if he was raised in say, the Babylon 5's Earth Alliance, and had to deal with all the prejudices, apathy, intolerance, and indifference that comes from that world. He'd probably be much more similar to Lore than to his own compassionate, ethical self.

This is basically what chuck said in the matrix review. Ai won't be evil if we treat it like we would a human rather than a slave.