Plasma Pool

Robert Picardo as Star Trek: Voyager's "the doctor"

In the world of the Star Trek franchise, Starfleet’s emergency medical hologram (EMH) was designed by the Federation’s top “holographer,” one Dr. Louis Zimmerman, to supplement or temporarily assume the duties of a starship’s chief medical officer in extraordinary circumstances—such as a shipwide medical emergency or the untimely death of the chief medical officer. The EMH is designed to make diagnoses, perform procedures, and operate; he has self-awareness, a consciousness of a sort, and the medical skill and knowledge of Starfleet’s best doctors. Yet he is still, or at least he is still considered, merely a piece of technology.  When he has served his purpose, the EMH is filed away in his ship’s main computer, where he waits, oblivious to the passage of time, until he’s called upon again.

The EMH of Star Trek: Voyager—“the doctor”—isn’t so oblivious. In the first episode of the series, the U.S.S. Voyager is thrown halfway across the galaxy, killing almost all of the medical staff and forcing the short-term EMH to permanently become the ship’s surgeon—something he is decidedly not designed for.   When he’s kept online for long stretches, his “holomatrix” can easily destabilize or degrade, leaving his program vulnerable to various forms of resetting and erasure.  Temperamentally, he is irritable and arrogant, presumptuous and self-absorbed; interacting with him on a daily basis, as the crew of Voyager is forced to, is trying.

Yet the longer Voyager’s EMH remains online, the more information he assimilates, the more he can reflect upon and reorder that information, and the more he can meaningfully exchange that information with human beings, the closer he comes existing as a form of life that humankind must recognize as intelligent, one desirous and deserving of sovereignty.  The doctor runs almost constantly, accumulating knowledge, forming friendships, reading for pleasure, attending parties, going on away missions, designing and executing experiments and conducting research, taking up photography, creating and spending time with a holographic family, running holonovels on the holodeck, even becoming a master tenor with followers throughout the quadrant:

He even carries on romances and sexual liaisons, as he explains here to a subsequent iteration of the EMH played by an unusually sober Andy Dick:

The doctor distinguishes himself to such an extent that a recurring plot element in Voyager’s first few seasons is his effort to choose an appropriate name for his newly realized self.  (He never succeeds; although the name “Zimmerman” was, prior to the show’s premiere, supposed to be his eventual selection.)  Voyager’s Captain, Kathryn Janeway, struggles with the doctor’s growth throughout the series, forced as she is time and again to weigh the doctor’s individual rights—which, for good reason, she is slow to acknowledge; one gets the idea that if she were alive today and not serving as the first female chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, she’d be something like Ann Coulter for the progressive evangelical left—against the ship’s nonnegotiable need of an full-time physician.  The doctor may not have been designed to become sentient, but, as Janeway and the rest come to realize, he nonetheless surpasses his programming and becomes an individual.

Many other Voyager episodes deal with defining the doctor’s rights as an individual; and many episodes of Voyager, Deep Space Nine (DS9), and The Next Generation (TNG) interrogate the potential for and treatment of a variety of other “artificial” technologic lifeforms.  Voyager grapples with warring armies of robots whose creators are long dead, with a smart bomb that gets a bit too smart (taking over the doctor’s program), and with holographic townsfolk who discover the crew’s ability to alter their holographic world at will —among many others.  DS9 deposits humanoid crewmembers on a holodeck—effectively transforming them, temporarily, into holograms much like the doctor—in the aftermath of a transporter accident (holodecks and transporters both operate by taking apart and reassembling matter); and a holographic lounge singer, Vic Fontaine, becomes a close friend and confidante to many of the station’s inhabitants, who hold him in such high esteem that they engineer and execute an elaborate heist to prevent Vic from losing his nightclub when it is taken over by mafia thugs in faux-1962.  TNG’s Enterprise inadvertently creates a colony of collectively intelligent nanites (who regard humans as “ugly bags of mostly water”); a Sherlock Holmes character, Professor James Moriarty, becomes aware of himself and uses his integration with the main computer to hijack the ship and kidnap its C.M.O., Dr. Pulaski. Lt. Commander Data, the android played by Brent Spiner, sees his rights and the rights of his “brother” Lore and “daughter” Lal tested and violated repeatedly despite his manifest “humanity”: Data isn’t merely an elaborate external presentation, but has a rich inner life as well. He, for instance, dreams:

Is such life sovereign? Is it to be accorded the same rights as other, established forms of sentient life? Voyager’s sixth-season episode “Life Line,” takes up all these issues, posing questions about artificial intelligence, human perspectives on that intelligence, and how these human perspectives are characterized by an insdious disingenuousness. In “Life Line” (click the preceding link to watch the entire episode online) the doctor pleads with Janeway to be sent from the Delta Quadrant, where Voyager is marooned, to the Alpha Quadrant, home to Earth and the rest of the Federation, via a datastream that Starfleet has recently, and at much cost, established with Voyager.  The doctor’s creator, Zimmerman, is dying of some sort of cellular degradation, and although the Federation’s best doctors have all struck out at trying to find a treatment for Zimmerman’s condition, the doctor thinks he has developed a remedy that will succeed—one that relies upon nanotechnology developed in the Delta Quadrant. Janeway balks but eventually authorizes the visit, and soon the doctor is standing face-to-face with Zimmerman, the closest thing he has to a father and, because he is modeled on Zimmerman physically and personally, the closest thing there is to another version of himself.

Voyager's doctor, Counselor Deanna Troi, and Dr. Louis Zimmerman

Unfortunately for the doctor, Zimmerman finds it preposterous that this simple EMH Mark I thinks he can do much more than maneuver a scalpel—an EMH Mark II, Mark III, and Mark IV have been developed since the doctor was activated, and none of them can save Zimmerman; what, Zimmerman asks, makes this relic of holotechnology think it can do better?  Zimmerman refuses treatment, and he and the doctor, both stubborn, egotistical pricks, are soon not speaking to one another, prompting Zimmerman’s acquaintances—TNG’s Lt. Reginald Barclay and counselor Deanna Troi, and Zimmerman’s holographic assistant Haley—to take drastic action. Unbeknownst to the doctor, they plant an algorithm in his program that is designed to destabilize it to the point that only Zimmerman, giant of holography, could have any hope of fixing it.  It is their hope that this ordeal will forge a bond between the two men and lead eventually to Zimmerman embracing the doctor’s treatment.

In planting that algorithm, they take a fairly large risk.  If Zimmerman refuses or fails, the doctor is kaput. All this is fine, or at least consistent, if we assume that Barclay, Troi and Haley are comfortable playing Russian Roulette with the doctor’s life. Yet it is they who convince Zimmerman of the importance of saving this single hologram’s life, maintaining that aside from his physical composition, he’s no different from any other person.  He may be a “smattering of photons and forcefields,” but he’s also a thinking, feeling person with obligations, emotions, and friends. Zimmerman, the three argue, is mistaking a life for a piece of property.  Haley—herself a hologram and Zimmerman’s loyal friend—is especially emphatic on this point.  Would Zimmerman let her die so easily, too?  Is she, too, merely “photons and forcefields”?  And Barclay, as a recovering holoaddict, is no stranger to holograms, either; he has spent countless hours interacting with holographic friends and lovers with whom he has formed genuine emotional bonds.  Troi has no special connection to holotechnology that I can recall, but her TNG character would never authorize, much less participate in, such a gambit. (She outranks Barclay.)

Lt. Reginald Barclay

The arguments Barclay, Troi and Haley advance here make sense, both internally and as products of their established characters. Nonetheless, their situation is a fundamentally contradictory one.  To save Zimmerman’s life, they must convince him of the doctor’s personhood—both so Zimmerman will trust that the doctor has the ingenuity to develop a working treatment, and, later, to save the doctor’s life.  But to convince Zimmerman of the doctor’s personhood, they must put his life in grave jeopardy.  This might be acceptable if the doctor had known about their plan and consented to it, or even if Barclay—Zimmerman’s heir apparent as the Federation’s hologuru—had been absolutely certain that any damage to the doctor could be repaired, either by Zimmerman or by Barclay himself.  But there is no evidence that Barclay had any sort of failsafe.  Barclay, Troi and Haley risk killing the doctor in order to have him recognized as a life that should not be allowed to die. They toss him over a cliff and hope to shock Zimmerman into catching him.

They profess respect for holographic life, but can do so only because they themselves have endangered it—and in order to save human life. Making the doctor a sovereign, sentient being in Zimmerman’s eyes is the only way to save Zimmerman, even if it means robbing the doctor of his sovereignty and perhaps his sentience in the process.  They did what they needed to do to accomplish their goal.  Yet if this is true, given that the overwhelming bulk of evidence from Barclay’s and Troi’s pasts demonstrate that they probably wholeheartedly believe the arguments they make to Zimmerman, there isn’t a way to make sense of all this that doesn’t cast Barclay and Troi as either overconfident or sadistic and Haley as naïve at best and a self-hating hologram at worst.

If new media and computing continue to integrate themselves into our lives at the rate they have in the few decades, we will—so long as money keeps flowing to computer scientists, AI researchers, and artists—encounter beings like the doctor and Haley sooner than we think. We can already interact with avatars representing real people in online communities like Second Life.  Many programs specifically designed to mimic real-life experience are under development, and already released programs become more lifelike with each iteration. How long will it be before a monster data organization like Google or Oracle can compile and arrange all the interactions of cohorts of real-life Second Lifers (for instance) into a program that can interact with us in a “human” enough way so as to be mistaken for a human being consistently enough to bring moral questions of rights and respect into play? And how long until our computer scientists, engineers and prosthesis makers can fashion a passably-human facsimile of a human—a facsimile that can walk, talk, see, touch, reason, kiss, and even have sex—into which to upload this program? How then will we regard our creation? It is an assembly of data processors and memory and metal and latex (or whatever the equivalent materials at the time happen to be), but provided the faux-epidermis is convincing, from the standpoint of an individual human with no knowledge of its innards, it is also quite alive. Who knows how many steps lie between the eerily lifelike Jules (the newest Briton)—

—unveiled earlier this week by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and The Next Generation’s Data?:

Faced with such life, will we, like Barclay and Troi, harbor an emphatic but effectively empty respect for it? The doctor and Data are of a fictional future, but we’re approaching a real future that looks, at least with respect to artificial intelligence, a good deal like it—and far faster than we think.