Week 10 Entry

The Star Trek episode "The Measure of a Man" raises some very interesting issues about the rights of artificially intelligent beings. My first inclination is to think that the issue is irrelevant because there are no artificially intelligent beings, and will not be any in the near future. Dreyfus argues that there will never be any, and I am inclined to agree with him. However, I resist the inclination to dismiss the issue as irrelevant because I believe that humanity has made mistakes in the past by not deciding how to treat a particular technology before it os developed. Rather, we wait until a technology is developed to decide what we should do with it, and invariably someone uses it inadvisably before we realize the consequences. From that point of view, I believe that it is important to discuss the implications of potential technologies before they have been developed.
I found it odd that there was ever any question of Star Fleet owning Data in the first place. It seemed from the background information about Data that was given that he joined Star Fleet as a volunteer. It would seem to me that the question of Data's rights was decided when he was allowed to join Star Fleet as a volunteer. If he has the right to volunteer himself, then he also should have the right to resign. Even if he isn't deserving of any rights, and is merely a piece of hardware, Star Fleet has no claim to own him as they neither ceated him nor bought him. However, without the question of Data being owned by Star Fleet, the issues brought up in the episode could not have been brought up. I also found it odd that the final ruling wasn't even decided based on whether or not Data deserved to have rights. The final decision was made based on some hypothetical situation in which a whoe "race" of Datas are treated as slaves, and the decision seemed to be made that it would be undesirable for humans to treat the robots in that way, not that the robots deserved better treatment. I thought it was ironic that it was never really decided that Data met "the measure of a man."