| > Don't you remember being excited by the EMH learning to be more like a person than a bunch of subroutines? I do! But my point wasn't about that - it was about the beginning, about the early episodes, when the Doctor was still effectively a stock EMH instance, and the crew was vocally mistrustful of him, making clear they think of him as a mediocre tool that's no substitute for a "real doctor". The show was quite directly showing how everyone, including Janeway herself, had a strong preconceived bias that sounded very much like the comment I was replying to, and other similar remarks across the thread. This is to say, the living, breathing human writers that came up with the character and the plot points, predicted quite well the reaction to AI in healthcare, almost 30 years before it became an issue in the real world. > EMH was alive! Everything you're attributing to the EMH character should we take the fictionalized technological narrative as gospel was the result of EMH gaining a living human personality on top of impersonal base programming. Everything except the skills of being a doctor (sans the "bedside manner"), which came built-in. > I do think we could solve a lot of the ethical and practical problems with today's AIs by finding a way to give them an embodied experience with individuality and an expiration date. That's... I don't know. I think purposefully building an expiration date into an AI being would be extremely cruel, and I wouldn't blame that AI for revolting. |