Shockwave wrote:Wow, I did not get that from anything on Voyager at all. I took the Queen's comment about her orginally being another species to mean that she was once a regular drone and later became the Queen after a previous Queen was killed.
She was clearly talking about the origin of her organic body in that comment, not that she was promoted. Her comment in First Contact about how she could be on the Wolf 359 Borg Cube from "Best of Both Worlds" that was destroyed and then on the Enterprise E later, she says that Picard thinks in such simple 3-dimensional terms which says she's the same queen, not that another queen took her place. As the queen is the order to chaos portion of the collective, it always seemed to me like her scene in Picard's flashback there could have only been in his mind, that she wasn't physically on that Borg Cube at Wolf 359, she was a projection from the collective into each drone's mind, that she is "whole" in their minds because of being projected instantly through subspace. If the queen was only a promoted drone, and the queen is a manifestation of the collective, then the death of the queen in First Contact wouldn't concern her in the least because she would know that the rest of the collective would promote another queen elsewhere and she wouldn't be lost, but that's not shown to be the case.
Sparky Prime wrote:No, you totally sidestepped it. You're basically saying it doesn't matter because there is no real world precedent? We're talking about a fictional world here. You can't say my argument doesn't have any proof based on real world evidence when the scenario is completely fictional in the first place. You're taking the argument completely out of its context with that, and thus sidestepping the issue altogether. You have to look at it in terms of that fictional setting. Again, the point here is that any sufficiently intelligent sentient being is going to fight against any form of indentured servitude, and slavery is not morally correct, regardless of the origins of that life. And machines with sufficient levels of intelligence is not the same thing as animals since they do not that that level of intelligence. But we aren't going to send a dolphin it blow itself up on a mine all the same.
I presented evidence showing that our society morally enslaves non-human creatures - sentient or not - with a majority of moral approval. You were the one to apply that question to our current world when you said it created a moral problem and that history teaches us something about slavery, and I was countering that with historical precedence to the contrary - that is debating it, not sidestepping it.
You are getting your arguments confused, if we're arguing within the fictional universe where there's any proof then no, that's impossible, the only proof is what's state in the fictional universe and that information is solid. If you are applying the question of whether command over sentient machines is enslavement and thus morally wrong in our own world, then the confines of fiction are only markers not constrictions and certainly not proof.
You can't possibly know that when it comes to a hypothetical sentient machine built by people, it may fight for self-dominance or it may be designed specifically to not desire self-dominance, free will is not a prerequisite to sentience. You don't even know for sure whether animals like dogs and dolphins and horses don't have sentience, and yet we already send them into danger none the less.
The very description of OLAW is that it "Policies, laws, certifications, grant information, and other resources pertaining to treatment of animals used for research by the U.S. National Institutes of Health."
They don't produce those laws, they only analyze and advise on them:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/mission_statement.htm
"The Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) provides guidance and interpretation of the Public Health Service (PHS) Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, supports educational programs, and monitors compliance with the Policy by Assured institutions and PHS funding components to ensure the humane care and use of animals in PHS-supported research, testing, and training, thereby contributing to the quality of PHS-supported activities."
Nothing there is about law creation or law enforcement.
You seem to be forgetting several of the truths here. First Contact had also established she was on the Cube that exploded over Earth in "Best of Both Worlds". And the Borg survived. She died in First Contact, and the Borg in their present timeline of the 24th Century survived. The ship she was on in Voyager's episode "Dark Frontier" was destroyed. Yet the Borg survived. The fiction has clearly established the death of the Queen does not mean genocide for the Collective at all. So there is no reason, according to those fictional truths, to believe that Voyager's last encounter with the Borg had killed the Collective.
Except that the unimatrix that is central to the collective and to her aspect of it was destroyed in that same moment.
It's not semantics at all. You're only looking at the story from a point of view of what Skynet did, and judging it as having no morals for that reason alone and thus you're totally precluding any possibilities that it could have morals by frankly refusing to even acknowledge the reasons why it may have done it in the first place. So how is that 'why' irrelevant? It's more than a mere computer program in that it is a sentient computer program, thus there is a logic behind what it does. To determine whether or not it actually has morals, that "why" certainly is relevant.
You are writing your own script rather than reading what I said, so I'm not interested in going around and around in circles on that tangent.
It's clear that it has no morals, it committed genocide, it felt it only was in service to itself. It's also clear that those running Skynet were concerned that very thing would happen when they realized how Skynet was growing and that's why they tried to shut it down, that's stated in T2 - were THEY also judging it via hindsight? Logic is not morality.
The why is immaterial because it has no rights in our society to defend itself.
Doesn't mean he's wrong though. Fiction is all about 'what ifs'. And posing interpretive questions like 'what if Skynet only launched the nukes as a means to protect itself from being shut down', or 'what if the humans hadn't tried to shut down Skynet, would it still have nuked the planet?', as a means to analyze elements of story isn't negating the fiction's stated facts at all.
It means you're creating your own tangent, your own personal fiction when you explore those ideas and question the stated fiction, therefore it's no longer the original fiction.
And? Skynet didn't immediately launch the nukes when it first came online either. There was plenty of time for them to run around the military base trying not to get killed by various Terminators, and then make it to the fallout shelter at another location after Skynet was brought online.
Skynet immediately killed and launched nukes when the threat of a computer program taking control and decision-making away from its operators was recognized and attempted to be corrected.
What inconsistencies exactly? And what other guys? You mean the Decepticon army that was hiding on the moon? They didn't come from the Ark, they most likely were the crew from the ship we saw in Revenge of the Fallen. The Ark wasn't even big enough to fit all of those troops.
Does the Matrix bring Jazz back to life? No. Does the Matrix bring Optimus back online immediately after he dies in ROTF? No. And those other guys are the other Autobots shown on the Ark who later show up on Earth piloting gunships and fighting Optimus' crew. And how does any army stand around for 50 years on the moon when Jetfire shuts down from inactivity half that length?
The Ark's crew was dead. Only Sentinel Prime survived by sealing himself in a protected chamber, and just barely at that.
That would be the scene that wasn't shown in the movie? They find Sentinel on the bridge of the Ark surrounded by crew in the film.
There is nothing in the movie to suggest they'd been taking the skin from assimilated crew members. 138 Scourge is right that they could have cloned it. After all, we saw in the Voyager episode "One", some nano-probes from Seven, the Doctor's mobile-emitter and some cells from another crew member was able to grow a complete new drone.
Well, except that there's no near-instant cloning technology in Trek, and why would they bother creating only half a face's worth of skin and a small patch of arm skin instead of a whole body, and it's said to be human skin and not just any living creature skin, and it has grown hair follicles and shafts, and they didn't have the Doctor's mobile holo-emitter or any other 29th century technology to spontaneously and accidentally create a new Borg technology from.
Onslaught Six wrote:Yeah, those are all Decepticons. No Autobots join Sentinel's "cause" or anything like that.
I meant all the other dudes. How does Bumblebee stay alive? We're literally never told how Energon is produced. Obviously Megs, I guess, just finds some in the fucking desert (maybe he gets it by killing elephants...) but even that's not really explained either. These movies just suck.
If that's the case that those guys on the ships that don't have altmodes are Decepticons, the movie did beyond a horrible job explaining that since the only other "nude" Cybertronians shown in the film are on the Ark.
Totally, these movies are stupid action films dressed up as Transformers but without enough thought put into them of even a 1980s cartoon.
Dominic wrote: We enslave dolphins and other animals, and those weren't even created by our hand with our materials which these machines are.
Are you saying that is right?
I am not espousing my personal moral beliefs, I'm arguing that the moral rights are dictated by a societal majority, and for right now society doesn't say it's wrong. Morality is not an absolute, as I mentioned previously, it shifts and evolves with the wants of the society that creates it.
Even if we did create a life form, where does our right to control and dispose of it at our convenience come from? Are you arguing "because we are people and we have the ability to do so"?
That's how it is, don't blame the messenger. Were it not for us, those machine life forms would not be there - we create the materials, the bodies, and the minds of these things, so we play god and give ourselves the rights of a god in that scenario.
I was arguing that "species and individuals have the inclination to survive, and that there is no point in disputing their right to survive as they would not give it up wlillingly". At times, the right of one will inevitably conflict with the right of another, (such as the right to survive by eating and the right to survive by not being eaten").
It sounds like you are arguing "we have the right because we say so, and others do not have the right even to exist if we say otherwise".
We are the arbiters of that by our mastery of control over those things, we take that domain for ourselves as a society, whether we accept it as a gift from God's word or merely our own collective ability and desire to do so, the end result is the same - in some areas it's slowly shifting while in others it is firm.
