Artificial Thoughts

I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation this morning, the third season episode, "Booby Trap", from 1989. This is the one where Geordi falls in love with an AI woman who's helping him find a way to foil an alien tractor beam holding the Enterprise in a debris field by draining energy from the ship. It's obviously a story relevant to-day and I got a chill when Picard was compelled to ruminate on the advice from Geordi that they ought to turn the ship's controls over to the computer. He says to Commander Riker,

You know, Number One, you missed something not playing with model ships. They were the source of imaginary voyages, each holding a treasure of adventures. Manning the earliest spacecraft, flying an aeroplane, with only one propeller to keep you in the sky. Can you imagine that? Now the machines are flying us.

This is the episode in which Geordi falls in love with a holographic simulation of one of the engineers who designed the Enterprise, Lea Brahms. He does so accidentally. Geordi was always awkward with women throughout the series and this episode begins with him failing at another date with a young woman. Guinan advises him not to try so hard, to be more natural, instead of contriving scenarios with violinists on the beach, as he does in this episode. So when he's trying to solve the engineering problem in this episode, he inadvertantly follows Guinan's advice by developing a natural relationship with a coworker, who happens to be totally artificial. Life is what happens when you're making other plans.

Except she's not totally artificial, she's based on a real woman, who's none too happy with Geordi when she turns up in the flesh several episodes later. The simulation is based on her psychological profile with a "9.7% margin of error". That doesn't sound remotely far fetched to-day. It's not even certain that the difference between the real woman and the simulation is what causes the failure between Geordi and the real Lea to connect. Context is important, as is Geordi's awkwardness with women and the strange situation of having to restart an acquaintence with someone he feels he already knows.

I miss the days when Sci-Fi series deliberately challenged the viewer. Forty-five years before this became a real problem, this episode of Star Trek was asking questions like, is it only hubris that provokes the human insistence on the species' superiority to artificial beings, on the greater capacity for creativity in the human mind? Is the human mind truly more valuable or does the human mind just need to feel valuable?