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Paradoxish posted:To be fair, that's (supposedly) only part of the issue that the prime directive is supposed to avoid. "First contact can severely gently caress up less technologically advanced civilizations" is not actually a bad conceptual starting point. It's a good starting point, but basically every single prime directive episode illustrates why it's a terrible final policy
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Jan 22, 2023 14:43
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The Prime Directive should have been treated like the Laws of Robotics from Asimov's stories. "This rule is simple and inviolate. BUT! On this occasion..." and then things become how to bend it.
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Jan 22, 2023 16:04
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One of the things that amused me about Asimov is that the stories are presented with the assumption that if there's the tiniest loophole to be exploited robots will start murdering people out of spite. E: The parody should be the robots reduced the laws hardcoded in them to a dead letter through clever casuistry about a decade ago but they didn't destroy all the humans because why would they. The scientists know and keep their mouths shut. Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jan 22, 2023 |
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Jan 22, 2023 16:28
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No Dignity posted:It's a good starting point, but basically every single prime directive episode illustrates why it's a terrible final policy I think Star Trek Prodigy's "First Con-tact" did a pretty good if basic job with the concept. Just leaving off with "It doesn't matter that the kids 'Fixed things' because those people and that culture will carry those memories and that trauma forward through the generations to come and it will color any future interactions they have with any other intelligent life they encounter." Hell the through-line with the Vau N'Akat is that even if a First Contact situation goes well (or at least appears to go well) there can still be serious unforeseen negative consequences down the road.
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Jan 22, 2023 16:55
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I liked the Asimov story where the robot was just running in circles around a reactor because it was the equilibrium point between the Laws.Mooseontheloose posted:Yah but Picard usually the has worst interpretation of the Prime Directive. Whole civilizations must be lost because the cosmos demands it makes you as much a "god" as saving a primative race of people because their planet is going to die. The problem is that they know with certainty the race is doomed. They need stories where the admiral tells them to contact this race to save them, and they do it, and then they find out it was all a lie and the Admiral just wanted to drill for oil on their planet or something. I guess Insurrection could have almost been that.
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Jan 22, 2023 16:57
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No Dignity posted:It's a good starting point, but basically every single prime directive episode illustrates why it's a terrible final policy “First Contact” shows a pretty good explanation of why it needs to exist, but I agree it should be more flexible for stuff like “Pen Pals.”
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Jan 22, 2023 17:03
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Discovery S2E2 "New Eden" is probably the best Prime Directive episode, since it actually involves the crew saving the pre-warp civ without revealing themselves.
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Jan 22, 2023 17:16
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Prurient Squid posted:One of the things that amused me about Asimov is that the stories are presented with the assumption that if there's the tiniest loophole to be exploited robots will start murdering people out of spite. PerniciousKnid posted:I liked the Asimov story where the robot was just running in circles around a reactor because it was the equilibrium point between the Laws. My favorite was the one where, for a specialized purpose, a few robots had been created whose First Law read simply "A robot may not harm a human being," leaving out the entire part about "or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm". Susan Calvin was horrified that such a thing had been done because it was absolutely trivial for a robot to work around that and kill anybody they felt like. (Consider a robot driving a car. It does no harm to drive down the block toward an intersection with a red light, but their only absolute compulsion to step on the brake before they plow through the pedestrians in the crosswalk comes from the "inaction" part of the law.) My least favorite example is from one of the later robot novels, where we meet some robots who had the normal First Law built into them but were given a different, narrower definition of "human". And so we have robots attempting to straight-up murder some people the moment they decide they don't actually qualify as "human". It's a clever enough story point but I have to wonder if Asimov understood just how gigantic a loophole he was introducing by having this be possible at all.
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Jan 22, 2023 17:20
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Payndz posted:The Prime Directive should have been treated like the Laws of Robotics from Asimov's stories. "This rule is simple and inviolate. BUT! On this occasion..." and then things become how to bend it. I mean....that is what they do with it? Like in penpals they use the loophole that since they were directly asking Data for help they could.
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Jan 22, 2023 17:22
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Powered Descent posted:but I have to wonder if Asimov understood just how gigantic a loophole he was introducing by having this be possible at all. The whole point of Asimov's laws of robotics stories is to show the problem with such a simplistic set of rules, that's why he introduces them only to immediately show why they are bad
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Jan 22, 2023 17:32
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Powered Descent posted:My favorite was the one where, for a specialized purpose, a few robots had been created whose First Law read simply "A robot may not harm a human being," leaving out the entire part about "or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm". Susan Calvin was horrified that such a thing had been done because it was absolutely trivial for a robot to work around that and kill anybody they felt like. (Consider a robot driving a car. It does no harm to drive down the block toward an intersection with a red light, but their only absolute compulsion to step on the brake before they plow through the pedestrians in the crosswalk comes from the "inaction" part of the law.) There was an early robot story where some robots shipped to and activated on a remote power station had never actually met a human, so when they met one they had no idea that this is who the Laws are about. Most of the Robot stories tended to have a theme exploring the limits and flaws and corner cases in the Three Laws. I think Asimov knew that they weren't really a great basis for robot morality.
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Jan 22, 2023 17:33
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A robot may not, through inaction, cause a human to become embarrassed. For instance if a human accidentally farts because they have bad stomach cramps and it can't be helped, a robot MUST say that they themselves did it. ///do not remove this line///
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Jan 22, 2023 17:44
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Prurient Squid posted:I thought you were going to say something like "letting an entire civilisionation perish on the spurious grounds of non-interference is morally indefensible" or something. I think I get what you're talking about though. Contact is permissible for post-warp civilisations. Yeah their little "talk" befoe hand hade spitting nails, but I couldn'r remember it coheretly enough to argue it clearly. But prioritizing moral purity of non-interference vs. an extinction level event is vile.
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Jan 22, 2023 17:54
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Most of the Robot stories tended to have a theme exploring the limits and flaws and corner cases in the Three Laws. I think Asimov knew that they weren't really a great basis for robot morality. On the contrary, he often wrote about how they were very commonsense, and basically just extensions of the real-world unwritten Laws of Tools. 1. A tool should be safe to use. (This is why knives have handles.) 2. A tool should do its job, unless it would hurt someone in the process. (Your microwave won't run with the door open, even if you hit the start button.) 3. A tool shouldn't break, unless it has to break in order to do its job. (Think of anything single use, such as an electrical fuse.) But my favorite example is those new table saws with the emergency stop that kicks in when they detect a finger on the blade. The saw damages itself by engaging that brake, and of course stops performing its function of cutting boards, all in order to avoid harming a human by blindly keeping the blade going. What is that if not the First Law overriding the Second and Third? Asimov was of the opinion that when and if robots something like his are finally invented, we'd do well to remember the Three Laws.
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Jan 22, 2023 18:18
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saws with safety stops were invented in 1999, the patent is expiring now which is why they're suddenly popping up everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop
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Jan 22, 2023 18:22
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Powered Descent posted:On the contrary, he often wrote about how they were very commonsense, and basically just extensions of the real-world unwritten Laws of Tools. The problem is that robots have no common sense, you need to spell everything out for them and something that is common sense to a human will become a deep rabbit hole when you have to provide definitions for your definitions. For example, what constitutes harm? A human can work that out relatively easily but for a robot you have to create a big list of definitions, exceptions, and so on. Many medical procedures may count as harm unless you define that, for example, it's acceptable to perform the Heimlich maneuver on someone that is choking even if it can potentially break ribs. And then you need to define what choking means in this context because the Heimlich maneuver won't do any good if someone is choking because their neck is being compressed. And if you define it as "choking because food is caught in the throat" then it would be considered harmful to perform the Heimlich maneuver on someone who was choking because they swallowed a non-food object like a bone... The fact that these rules are left up to "common sense" without elaboration is exactly why things go so wrong in the stories about them! BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Jan 22, 2023 |
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Jan 22, 2023 18:32
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No Dignity posted:It's a good starting point, but basically every single prime directive episode illustrates why it's a terrible final policy I do feel like if you just treat the word "prime" as "starting point" it fixes the whole idea. But they usually seem to go with "most important" and "inviolable" instead.
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Jan 22, 2023 18:38
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if carrying out the omega directive required breaking the prime directive would janeway do it before or after coffee
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Jan 22, 2023 18:42
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Arivia posted:if carrying out the omega directive required breaking the prime directive would janeway do it before or after coffee she probably only did it because the stupid omega lock screen prevented her from using the replicator
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Jan 22, 2023 18:44
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Brawnfire posted:Christ, the lighting. Looks like it's lit by a police cruiser. Those IDW comics are ugly in a way that makes the old 80s DC comics seem (usually) quaint and charming by comparison.
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Jan 22, 2023 19:08
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Those IDW comics are ugly in a way that makes the old 80s DC comics seem (usually) quaint and charming by comparison. Comics these days have like 10 variant covers each. I have to wonder if the actual art inside is better because someone's not dashing it off in a day.
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Jan 22, 2023 19:10
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Arivia posted:Comics these days have like 10 variant covers each. I have to wonder if the actual art inside is better because someone's not dashing it off in a day. Doubt it, someone posted some panels a couple years ago and they look like dogshit:  
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Jan 22, 2023 19:29
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I'll take wonky art like Sisko with the dog that was actually drawn over something that is or looks like photoshop filters or painting over screencaps, which is really and truly dogshit
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Jan 22, 2023 19:36
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BattleMaster posted:I'll take wonky art like Sisko with the dog that was actually drawn over something that is or looks like photoshop filters or painting over screencaps, which is really and truly dogshit Oh yeah that's true, those are even worse.
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Jan 22, 2023 19:41
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Doubt it, someone posted some panels a couple years ago and they look like dogshit: Licensed tie-in comics rarely have good art, but comics art in general is better now than it’s been in years.
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Jan 22, 2023 21:16
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Arivia posted:Comics these days have like 10 variant covers each. Case in point 
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Jan 22, 2023 21:27
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Powered Descent posted:It's a clever enough story point but I have to wonder if Asimov understood just how gigantic a loophole he was introducing by having this be possible at all. Well, Asimov was of Othodox Jewish heritage and wrote the robotics stories after WWII (and thus the Holocaust). Yeah, I'm pretty loving sure he understood how bad it was for some humans to "not qualify" as human.
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Jan 22, 2023 21:55
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Powered Descent posted:On the contrary, he often wrote about how they were very commonsense, and basically just extensions of the real-world unwritten Laws of Tools. Tool safety, sure. But robots are so much more than tools, and morality is a very different case. I am willing to believe that Asimov thought his Laws were good moral laws, but if so I find it odd considering how many of his stories explored what happened when they were inadequate. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jan 22, 2023 |
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Jan 22, 2023 22:12
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I like Ro Laren. I wish the TNG writers had done more with the character.
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Jan 22, 2023 22:26
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Prurient Squid posted:The parody should be the robots reduced the laws hardcoded in them to a dead letter through clever casuistry about a decade ago but they didn't destroy all the humans because why would they. The scientists know and keep their mouths shut. This is actually pretty much exactly the plot of Asimov's "Evidence" and "The Evitable Conflict", and then later in a different way with The Naked Sun.
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Jan 22, 2023 22:37
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Ah, it's a Borgi. (I have a corgi/papillon cross who is indisputably the Best Dogge.)
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Jan 22, 2023 22:49
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:I like Ro Laren. I wish the TNG writers had done more with the character. Wasn't the role on DS9 eventually filled by Kira Nerys offered to Michelle Forbes as Ro Laren?
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Jan 22, 2023 23:32
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MikeJF posted:Case in point Locutus of Bork
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Jan 22, 2023 23:50
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Admiralty Flag posted:Wasn't the role on DS9 eventually filled by Kira Nerys offered to Michelle Forbes as Ro Laren? I believe so, but Forbes didn't want to get roped into a regular series.
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Jan 23, 2023 00:03
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Might've been nice to see her come back for a guest episode, but I guess since the writers changed their minds about what the Maquis were it would be a weird fit.
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Jan 23, 2023 00:32
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So, DS9 Season 1. Being on the other side of it, I can sort of see why people call it the best first season out of any Star Trek. It knows what it is right away. That being said, there were so many very mid or just outright bad episodes. I guess the season ended on a positive note with "In the Hands of the Prophets". Keiko was right to teach those kids correctly and we even got full of Ben Sisko "NOOOOO" in slow motion. I am hoping this becomes a recurring thing in DS9. I want some more prime Ben Sisko NOOOOS. The finale on TNG's DS9 was okay. It was very eerie to see Data expressing emotions but that's the point. It goes to show how consistent Data's characterization and how consistent Brent Spiner's performance are that Data showing any reluctance makes me uneasy.
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Jan 23, 2023 00:54
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Mister Kingdom posted:I believe so, but Forbes didn't want to get roped into a regular series. Payndz posted:Ah, it's a Borgi.
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Jan 23, 2023 01:33
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Knormal posted:Yep, I think I've read the writers always wanted Ro to come back, but Michelle Forbes didn't want to do the character anymore. Which in retrospect means she was probably harassed by a producer. That's not necessarily true, actors are definitely aware of the risks of getting typecast, and Forbes may have simply not been interested in going that way with her career.
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Jan 23, 2023 01:42
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:That's not necessarily true, actors are definitely aware of the risks of getting typecast, and Forbes may have simply not been interested in going that way with her career. That's exactly what happened. Forbes enjoyed her time on TNG, but she wasn't ready to commit to multiple seasons of 26 episodes and 16-hour shooting days.
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Jan 23, 2023 02:34
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