dammit @protectspock because now you have me THINKING about hologram rights and honestly i don’t know which of your 12 posts to stick my thoughts so i’m putting them here:
i’m not 100% sure that data is the best analogue for the EMH. i mean, from a viewer’s perspective, yeah! they’re both charismatic main characters who have the language skills to advocate for their wants and needs, and they’re unique beings rather than a race of artificial sentient life -- but from a legal/ethical/social standpoint I feel like we can consider the EMH/other holograms to be more like the exocomps from tng’s “the quality of life.”
in that ep, our very moral tng crew considers the questions you mention (about the voyagers having to wonder if their holographic sex toys also have rights): if we let the exocomps have self-determination, does that imply that all AI technology deserves rights? does the enterprise computer have the right to refuse commands that could endanger its safety? they decide no -- but one has to think, is that just because the enterprise hasn’t tried to? (and then they have to wrestle with that again in “emergence” when the enterprise does seem to exert its own will... but they ultimately get off the hook when it turns out it’s not the enterprise itself.)
so!! in-universe, i feel like that’s the conversation janeway and the others around the EMH are having. the intention of the creator probably doesn’t matter once an AI has developed sentience and demands rights, but i think it explains the societal context. soong set out to create sentient androids and gave them the ability to adapt and grow for no reason other than to expand their quality of life. data chose to join starfleet and chose to create a daughter, so literally everyone should agree “yes, he should also be able to choose to resign or keep his kid” and the characters who disagree are rightly played as villains.
the EMH is more personable than the exocomps, of course, but like them, he was created as a tool to serve a specific purpose in a specific environment for a limited time. “i don’t have a life, i have a program.” it seems likely that dr. zimmerman, like the scientist who programmed the exocomps, would have tried to prevent the development of sentience in the EMHs if he saw it as a possibility, because it would get in the way of their ability to serve the function they were designed for.
so the question janeway faces in “virtuoso” is the same as “the quality of life” -- should these beings who have demonstrated some measure of sentience be forced to do the work they were designed to do, at the expense of their own desires?
holograms also don’t have the ability to self-generate the resources necessary for survival, the way that, say, the nanites from tng’s “evolution” do (in another example of unexpected artificial sentience at an inconvenient time). the nanites are released onto their own planet to take care of themselves -- but holograms can’t create their own society, unless the environment is pre-set with holo-emitters (like in the ship they commandeer in “flesh and blood”) and they are intentionally programmed with all the skills necessary to maintain/expand their environment. so, do the organic beings have the moral obligation to do that, if that’s what the holograms want?
okay ALSO, last thought: when does the EMH develop sentience? he doesn’t really start advocating for individual rights (beyond like, can you stop turning me off randomly when i’m in the middle of something) until after the ep where he’s losing his memory, offers to be rebooted in order to serve his programmed function, and the crew denies it because he should get to keep his identity. so is it then? or is the mobile emitter -- the ability to determine his existence outside of sickbay -- a requirement?
