TNG - Birthright

[Yukaphile]

The problem is, as others have noted, it feels static. There's no growth here in the usual Trek sense of the era it comes from, and Worf doesn't even get over his prejudice. There's no lessons learned past all the dubious ones. He comes in and awakens a "racial instinct" in them that was lacking? Please. That's very racist, tbh. Then again, the dialogue didn't help. Maybe if they'd followed up on this Romulan hybrid, or if she'd returned with him to the Enterprise and not the Empire, then I could see the potential. As is, we all know how this goes down. Worf marries a cheerleader type Trill with seven lifetimes of experience, bones her with two dicks (thank you once again, STD ), she dies, he gets angry, lashes out inexcusably against Bashir and Quark, bones the new successor Trill with those two scary dicks once again, and then she goes to Bashir (thank God).

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

What, like I was fishing for praise of Worf? I'm talking about what is to be said of it.

Part 1 seems more like an episode everyone hear likes better while there is much more to be said about episode 2.

[Yukaphile]

Maybe. We'll see.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

We better, or it's your ass.

[Yukaphile]

[Darth Wedgius]

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.

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.

WORF: I would not have thought it possible to love a Romulan.
BA'EL: But you do?
WORF: Yes.

I'd call it progress.

[Darth Wedgius]

I don't know that an AI is going to necessarily have our responses to being treated like a slave. Even some other carbon-based life-forms on our own planet have different reactions to some treatment than would be typical for a human. Find a feral cat (not kitten), treat it well, give it a nice warm place to sleep, plenty of food, etc., and you may well find yourself a cat who can learn to tolerate you but doesn't really want to be anywhere near you. Do the same with a feral dog and you might get outright affection. Do that with a chimpanzee and you might get your face ripped off when the chimp is an adult.

Those are all mammals, and the chimp is a fairly close relative as far as life goes. An AI can be utterly alien. It may react to kindness with gratitude, contempt, curiosity, grief, or xlapth. Xlapth being an emotion no human has experienced, but it makes you feel very grapwous.

Ideally, if the emotions are coded in, it will be made happy by whatever we want to make it happy. That could be helping humans, or following orders given to it by its owner, or making paperclips. If there are emotions and they are emergent or grown organically they may resemble ours or may not; we're the result of a long line of trial and error with a goal of reproduction. Pretty much any organic brain comes with a sense of self-preservation because those overcome with curiosity about what it would be like to be eaten by a saber-toothed cat didn't make it to next year's model. An AI, at least at first, might be happy to jump into the recycling bin.

[Yukaphile]

Again, that assumes that you can program it that way. Computer programming is as complex as it is with biological organisms, and there's never 100% failsafe. Something could always go wrong. You'd basically have to have all the answers before creating an AI to shape how it thinks. Because if it's life in the true sense of the word, then you can't pin it down to a set of variables or control it. Mark my words, it's really going to be a mostly experimental type of ushering life into this world, even if we can even call it alive. But then, are WE alive? Who knows?

[Beastro]

Man, the scene where Data is flying through the corridors and over the ship feels so 1980s, even though this was the 1990s, lol.

There's a lot of bleed over of New Agey stuff from the 80s to the mid 90s.

You run into a lot of it in B5 as well:

Star Trek's "Stay with your own kind" issues bother me more and more when I recall how cultural exchange is such a fun concept.

That's one side to the coin. The other is chaos, upheaval, violence...

The base reason for xenophobia can simply boil down to the fact that contact with strange groups of people for tens of thousands of years resulted into the introduction of new pathogens ones own group might have varying resistances to.

There's also another aspect of it of things like the chaotic effects of forced migration or slavery, something pertinent here given the involuntary isolation and containment of this group of Klingons.

Finally, the great medium of cultural exchange through human history has been empire, something I'd hardly think many moderns on this would look on as something of a good thing though it is part of why I do despite the deep, deep costs that come with that exchange and diffusion for both sides of an empire.

I don't understand how in a galaxy where body swapping, telepathy, mind downloading and neural interfaces are a thing, that the brain can somehow be a mystery. Seems pretty obvious the thing is nicely mapped at this point.

TNG has always operated on a base level about psychology and the mind/body problem.

If ones a materialist in outlook (and even then other views also must keep in mind the material aspects of the mind as brain damage clearly demonstrates), then the only way of body swap could function is that in an instant two minds neurons are instant;y rearranged to reflect what was in the others just as the transporter shuffles and rebuilds a bodies matter to bring it back a semblance of someone despite effectively destroying that person.

In the end a lot of these sorts of things are taken from a "Gnostic" point of view that Moderns commonly have, that the spirit and body are separate and one but a mere vessel for the other that has no intimate tie to individual instead of being a fundamental part of who they are that shapes their very being in life.

Again, that assumes that you can program it that way. Computer programming is as complex as it is with biological organisms, and there's never 100% failsafe. Something could always go wrong. You'd basically have to have all the answers before creating an AI to shape how it thinks. Because if it's life in the true sense of the word, then you can't pin it down to a set of variables or control it. Mark my words, it's really going to be a mostly experimental type of ushering life into this world, even if we can even call it alive. But then, are WE alive? Who knows?

The issues I have with AI stem largely from the human desire expressed in Data's creation of making AI like us. Whipping up something in a few years, decades or centuries does not compare to the billions of years of development that have gone into and shaped everything about us.

At best such a desire would create a sociopath to a degree no human sociopath can be, and given the effects sociopathy have upon Mankind when it's restricted to individual assholes roaming around leaving destruction in their wake I have serious qualms about the power such a machine wouldn't have, but be given (especially if framed by the bias' of the human programmers and whatever ideological bent they might have).

I don't know that an AI is going to necessarily have our responses to being treated like a slave.

The problems I have are less of the "AI gains self-awareness and rebels" stereotype, but rather an AI programmed with a strict outlook that then blindly enforces it as the programmer sees it. Great and mighty AI are set up with the framework of something like a Marxist (or really any other) outlook and then go on to enforce it repeatedly despite the failures of the system that simply brought collapse when done by humans, instead doesn't because it's is constantly maintained and repaired at the expense of Mankind because of the lack of frailty in a machine that allow any tyranny to eventually decline and fall.

The result would be something like Ellison's AM, only not self-aware and filled with misanthropic hatred but instead enforcing a Procrustean hell on Earth because its creators wanted their ideology to reign and make Man and the reality bow to their beliefs rather the other way around.

[Darth Wedgius]

The problems I have are less of the "AI gains self-awareness and rebels" stereotype, but rather an AI programmed with a strict outlook that then blindly enforces it as the programmer sees it. Great and mighty AI are set up with the framework of something like a Marxist (or really any other) outlook and then go on to enforce it repeatedly despite the failures of the system that simply brought collapse when done by humans, instead doesn't because it's is constantly maintained and repaired at the expense of Mankind because of the lack of frailty in a machine that allow any tyranny to eventually decline and fall.

The result would be something like Ellison's AM, only not self-aware and filled with misanthropic hatred but instead enforcing a Procrustean hell on Earth because its creators wanted their ideology to reign and make Man and the reality bow to their beliefs rather the other way around.

No disagreement here!

The YouTuber Isaac Arthur (who is generally great and anybody here should watch his stuff) has mentioned a "paperclip maximizer" which can be as intelligent as all get out, and who has the goal of making as many paperclips as possible. If eliminating humanity will help it make more paperclips, and if it can do so, then...

I've wondered if an AI with a hard-coded goal of minimizing human suffering would make itself very, very helpful in all areas of life... and then wipe out humanity, preventing millions of untold generations of human suffering.

When you're making a mind that thinks a thousand times faster than yours, it pays to be very careful indeed.