Doctor Who: Robots of Death

[Fianna]

To be honest the holograms especially bug me as Trek acts as if a "program" is one bit of isolated code completely unconnected to every other "program" instead of a slew of shared modules and databases wrapped in a user interface.

Yeah, that kinda bugs me, too. While a program might make a computer sentient, the actual thing that's become sentient is not the software, but the hardware. And if the seemingly sentient program is just one of many programs being run on the same computer, it doesn't necessarily represent the computer as a whole. It could very well just be the equivalent of an actor putting on a performance so good that the people don't realize they're watching a fictional character.

Of course, Star Trek often isn't good about distinguishing between software and hardware. There are a bunch of times the Doctor was downloaded or transmitted into another device, and they treated it like he had been actually, physically moved from one device to the next, rather than simply creating a copy of his program on another device, while the original remains on Voyager's computer.

One of the things that I love about this story (and often gets overlooked) is the world building. Even though the "humans" are miners they were opulent clothing, lounge around on comfy chairs and of course ware the silliest of hats. Between that and a few bits of dialogue, we really get a feeling that we're looking in to an alien culture. Just a good bit of economical story telling IMO.

I have a feeling that if this story was made on New Who, the miners would be wearing dirty jumpsuits with welding goggles and grease on their faces.

Well, the point of the story is that all the hard or nasty labor is carried out by robots, with humans all being essentially management, waited on hand and foot by robot slaves.

[Riedquat]

Yeah, that kinda bugs me, too. While a program might make a computer sentient, the actual thing that's become sentient is not the software, but the hardware. And if the seemingly sentient program is just one of many programs being run on the same computer, it doesn't necessarily represent the computer as a whole. It could very well just be the equivalent of an actor putting on a performance so good that the people don't realize they're watching a fictional character.

Of course, Star Trek often isn't good about distinguishing between software and hardware. There are a bunch of times the Doctor was downloaded or transmitted into another device, and they treated it like he had been actually, physically moved from one device to the next, rather than simply creating a copy of his program on another device, while the original remains on Voyager's computer.

There's all sorts of interesting ideas that can be explored there that it's a pity they never delved deeper; when there was exploration of the idea it was more about how Data for example was more like humans in many ways rather than arguing for the point that he was fully self aware but exploring how he'd also be different. Mass Effect's geth are interesting there, trying to think of what you'd get from hundreds of separate pieces of software going off and experiencing different things then coming back together, the components always separating and merging again (I'd try to write something to explore that if I was up to the task). Again, unfortunately it didn't do much with it.