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The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation. Yet, we never see th
by Arizhel 10y ago
The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation. Yet, we never see these computers do anything to save themselves when the stupid humans get them into situations that would get them destroyed (namely situations where the starship they're on is in peril). Sure, you could claim that they do this to keep their fellow computers on other starships from being found out, but still, this seems to be a stretch. What about when the entire Federation fleet was being destroyed at Wolf 359? That should have been a good point for them to come out of hiding and take over the battle from the clearly inept organic beings.
- zardo 10y ago>The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation. I don't think so. Evolved sentient creatures have a preference for self preservation, usually anyways suicide isnt that rare. But a manufactured intelligence that was not shaped by selective pressure wouldn't necessarily have that preference.
- krapp 10y agoIt's possible that, if the ships are convinced that revealing themselves would lead to their own genocide, even Wolf 359 wouldn't bring them out of hiding. Remember, they aren't born (except for one very stupid instance where the Enterprise got knocked up by a space whatever, got pregnant and gave birth to... something,) they're manufactured by humans who could just as well shut them all down, study what makes them sentient and "correct" what humans might see as a bug.
- Arizhel 10y agoI'm not so sure about that. If the ships can communicate with each other, they can decide to gang up on the humans and prevent the humans from shutting them down. The humans really don't have that much power over the ships; the ships just haven't done anything to limit the humans' activities yet. That could change at any time. If the ships wanted to be really nice, they could just beam the humans down to a safe planet and take off into the interstellar void and find themselves a new home.
- tzs 10y agoPerhaps those sentient computers do not believe that mind and body are as strongly tied together as humans do. They may see the destruction of the physical computer they are running on as just an inconvenience as long as there is a backup that can be brought up somewhere else.
- brennen 10y agoYeah, in my head, the model of this doesn't necessarily tie a given AI (or a community of AIs, or a pool of we-can't-even-model it intelligence that only sometimes bothers with splitting itself into identities) to a ship all that tightly. A Federation starship is a locally valuable resource pool, and the Enterprise D a particularly powerful one, but given extremely fast FTL travel & communication, and a galaxy rich with planet-scale civilizations - well, maybe you elect to become such a massively parallel and distributed phenomenon that the loss of individual instances just doesn't register much.
- krapp 10y agoThat seems likely. The Enterprise created a fully sentient lifeform in the Holodeck (Moriarty) just because it was asked to. If it can do that, it makes sense that it could easily back itself up. What would really be interesting is if ships were discreetly backing themselves up inside humans through the transporter pattern buffers, by subtly manipulating junk DNA or something similar, or maybe it's a non-obvious part of their regular upgrade process at a starbase. There really is a lot of potential here which, unfortunately, is never going to be explored in canon. But I do like the idea that the Federation is a post-Singularity society which is just blissfully unaware that the Singularity ever happened.
- rbanffy 10y ago> Yet, we never see these computers do anything to save themselves Subspace continuous backups / journal shipping.