The years of research and development were spent making sure it didn't end up in self-aware megalomaniacal computer storage
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Not believable. Starfleet trying to fix glaring issues with their technology in an attempt to prevent those issues from happening in the future? They could never!
When they refit the Enterprise-E after fighting Shinzon, they gave the captain's chair a seatbelt.
It happens.
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Actually the years were spent converting Moriarty's holomatrix to the EMH. It explains his bedside manner perfectly.
This 100%. In Star Trek, it's easy to make intelligent life by accident: Badgey, Exo-Comps, Lore, Wesley's unnamed nanites. The hard part is keeping them from taking over the ship and killing all the organics.
The computer was tasked with creating an opponent that could defeat Data. Doing so required analyzing Data to assess what would be needed to fulfill that request. And the most complete source for that info would be the transporter, which has broken Data down at a molecular level and rebuilt him numerous times. And using that info, the computer imitates Data's own neural net as a baseline, then grafts a holo character on top of it. That these the things are compatible and can be so easily integrated is also demonstrated in A Fistful of Datas.
The EMH had to be built from scratch, as there wasn't a way to essentially steal Soong's life's work as a shortcut.
Excuse me sir, but this is !risa, not !daystrom.
Which is why I didn't go on to cite Our Man Bashir as further proof that a computer would load transporter data into a holodeck and convert it into characters.
So you’re saying we are able to replicate a positron if net using his preexisting pattern records.
And this is my new chosen headcanon.
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The Enterprise-D, being a giant showpiece ship had the most bleeding edge holodeck of the era. The holodeck uniquely incorporated a lot of TOS advanced alien technology, which Starfleet engineers mostly understood. Mostly. There were some hiccups.
The tech was refined and only in-house developed and vetted holotech was issued out following incidents such as Moriarty. It takes a lot longer to research and create from scratch than it does to plug in some alien tech or coding that you think you understand.
The EMH was not a janitor or menial laborer. It was a highly skilled holographic entity that was repurposed below its abilities. The repurposing was not a decision made to make use of the EMH’s abilities but out of spite by a jaded creator.
Also, whenever you notice something like that, a Q did it.
The Enterprise-D, being a giant showpiece ship had the most bleeding edge holodeck of the era. The holodeck uniquely incorporated a lot of TOS advanced alien technology, which Starfleet engineers mostly understood. Mostly. There were some hiccups.
So essentially they went to space stack-overflow and did some space cargo cult programming? Seems legit.
Space ChatGPT wrote it for them.
And messed up on several innocent looking, hard to figure out, and disastrous ways.
The first rule of programming club is: If it compiles, ship it!
ship it!
Literally, in this case.
What if it compiles but crashes later on due to memory leaks?
Charge for support
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In the words of Stargate SG1: “You can't just slap a US Air Force sticker on a death glider!”
Moriarty was draining enough of the Enterprise's power to cause brown outs and was using a huge chunk of the main computer's processing power. The EMH is much more efficient. He's also probably more sophisticated in other areas, like precision movement or being able to function in arbitrary non-holographic environments.
being able to function in arbitrary non-holographic environments.
He wasn't even designed to do that. He just adapted well enough to take it in stride. Dude was ridiculously overengineered.
My assumption was that it is part of his design for two reasons: 1) Zimmerman's holographic assistant seems to have that feature and I'm pretty sure she's older, and 2) they can't guarantee what future sickbays will look like so it's better to make a one-size-fits-all system than to build maps for each sickbay design into his program.
True, although the EMH ended up exceeding his design parameters in many ways. Zimmerman was a perfectionist and it shows in his work.
Just as well because you never know when any given Starfleet vessel will end up in a heteromorphic polaron flux that will force the ship into a time loop where only holograms move forward in time, forcing the EMH to derive ship operations and the captain's access codes from first principles so he can pilot the ship out of there from sickbay.
That probably happens on a monthly basis. And then the crew wonders how their holodoc has accumulated 78 years of runtime in five seconds.
Yeah, Zimmerman had the right idea.
Something to do with the Holodeck being able to stabalize holomatricies better than... Whatever the janitor programs were using.
But also, I'm not sure any of the enterprise crew were able to reproduce a Moriarty quality of intelligent from the Holodeck again. He was, a fluke of luck, a glitch, where as the janitors were intentionally designed, and coded, and were thus reproducible on demand.
Now I kinda wanna see a bunch of Moriartys generated on a ship that has holo-emitters throughout. How fast do they end up taking over the goddamn galaxy?
They would have potential, but Moriarty was defeated by his own ruse, which sounds like something a Barkley neural interfaced level being would have seen a mile away. So Moriarty gets 7/10 for effort! And if he behaves, a gold star.
Eventually he decided he didn't want to travel the galaxy and became a surly butler in Manhattan, living with a theater producer and an annoying nanny from Queens.
One Moriarty, true, but let's say he has an intrepid-class vessel with a crew complement of 150 (roughly what Voyager started with). How long before they figure out way to ways to neural interface on their own before ever going elsewhere?
With a personality like Moriarty’s, at least one is guaranteed to attempt gaining dominance over the others. And with a character background like his, that inevitable situation would be expected by all.
So even if they all start out working together for a larger purpose, the idea of the inevitable fight would irk each enough to drive a few into elaborate schemes to come out on top.
The irony will likely be in they will all try killing one another until only the last Moriarty, the true one lol. But I’m half awake and this feels like a potentially good Lower Decks premise.
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"Make a hologram of the fictional character Moriarty but make him aware that he's a hologram" is fairly simple compared to making a hologram who can act as a ship's emergency doctor.
…is it though? “Creating sentience” is the simpler of those two things? You could feed enough Medical journals and protocol into ChatGPT that it could probably do a better job at making medical decisions than at least one human doctor out there in the world. But we can’t just tell ChatGPT that it’s sentient and have that work lol.
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The downfall of Zimmerman wasn't the technical stuff; it was him injecting his own, abrasive, personality into all of them. And then also using Andy Dick and calling him an "upgrade." 🤮
On a more serious note: They heavily imply all those janitors are just as capable as Voyager's EMH. Which makes their situation way shittier because they know they are more than just tools.
What I still don't get is how Vic Fontaine is as self-aware as Moriarty and nobody questions it or even gives a shit.
Honestly his character really freaks me out.
With the EMH you have the argument of multiple persons put into him and meticulously crafted, just like Data.
With Moriarity you have a computer glitch combined with a unique phrasing/situation.
With Vic Fontaine... that's just the basic operations of the system.
If he's that sentient/self-aware then Starfleet is arguably creating lower intelligent lifeforms, who are basically months away from developing full sentience and sapience, and then deleting them or putting them into storage. They're just slaves.
With the EMH you have the argument of multiple persons put into him and meticulously crafted, just like Data.
With Vic Fontaine... that's just the basic operations of the system.
IMO Vic is likely like the EMH and based on a real person.
Bashir mentioned that Vic was created by a programmer called "Felix" - we don't specifically know how he created him, but in a mirror universe episode, "Vic" is there, except he's not a hologram, he's a real guy (who gets killed), and he doesn't respond to being called Vic.
My headcanon is that that was Mirror Felix, and Vic is modelled after his creater a la EMH.
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That's kinda the point of that one Voyager episode where the EMH writes a holonovel. Starfleet is super callous with holograms.
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The holodeck on the enterprize has been insane ever since the Binars messed with it. Theres never any telling when a seemingly random "incident" will occur there and their hack was so sophisricated nothing ever comes up in diagnostics.
To bad the Binars aren't interested in doing this type of things for reasons other than distracting Riker.
It's always hilarious to me that Minuet was used as Will's great love in Future Imperfect. I get it's just a convenient plot device but damn Riker, you spent like a couple hours with a simulation and somehow it registers higher than Troi??
Did they say they chose his greatest love? I thought they simply chose a women he had an emotional connection to, and accidently chose one that didn't exist.
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EMH was designed to be a doctor, not a janitor. I bet a lot of the work behind EMH was in proving mathematically that it would not harm patients (while at the same time, understanding that some temporary harm might be needed to save a patient's life). We see how core this is to an EMH's identity when in Voyager, the doctor goes crazy after not being able to save a crew member.
Meanwhile, Moriarty had no safeguards. That's part of why he was so dangerous to the crew of the Enterprise.
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The enterprise is a larger ship, it has 10x the crew as Voyager. 10x the size of a ship would be needed to house 10x the crew, which means 10x the computing space
Tomalak is really just playing G'Kar in that shot isn't he?
Thanks for the regular reminder that I need to watch Battlestar Galactica...
Battlestar Galactica
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Your theory has merit, considering the Binars were able to both run the holodeck and backup their entire species to Big D's computer.
However, the EMH was developed on Jupiter Station which is significantly larger than the Enterprise D and as such should have a ton of computing power. But maybe that was being used for other stuff, which is why he was so frustrated all the time.
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