Although NBC cancelled The Original Series after just three seasons, the phenomenal success of reruns of the program in early 1970s nationwide syndication (shown five nights a week in many regional and urban markets) encouraged Gene Roddenberry to venture again into science fiction network television production. The pilot film for Roddenberry’s creation, The Questor Tapes, was financed by NBC and filmed at Universal Television Studios. It was broadcast as a Movie of the Week in 1974, but never blossomed into the full consummation of a recurring series. The Los Angeles native and former LAPD desk sergeant considered actor Leonard Nimoy for the starring role of Questor – a humanoid android searching for its maker and purportedly “striving to become human” – but gave the role to Robert Foxworth. The fictional Questor was fabricated by another android who was sent to Earth by benevolent aliens thousands of years ago to help guide humanity onto a non-self-destructive path. The character’s circumstances bear some resemblance to those of the superhuman “trained by aliens” Gary Seven, played by Robert Lansing, in The Original Series episode Assignment: Earth, which was also originally made as a pilot for an unsold spinoff series.
Throughout the 1970s, Roddenberry contemplated bringing back Star Trek as a prime time TV show with fresh episodes. In 1977, the projected series Star Trek Phase II nearly came to fruition. It was to be the lead program of an early attempt by Paramount Pictures to form a fourth national television network. The crew ensemble of the starship Enterprise, sent on new missions by Starfleet ten years later, would reunite the original cast of characters, with the lone exception of the disillusioned Nimoy’s Mr. Spock. Replacing the Vulcan-human hybrid as Science Officer would be the fully Vulcan Lt. Xon, played by David Gautreaux, who would have no innate human (emotional) traits, and would be engaged in a constant struggle, in Roddenberry’s words, “to simulate laughter, anger, fear and other human feelings.” (Gross and Altman, Captain’s Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages) The Questor Tapes was stillborn as an android series and Star Trek II evolved into the first full-length movie Star Trek I: The Motion Picture (during the production of which Gautreaux’s ultra-logical Vulcan character was dropped). But major elements of Questor and Xon lived on in the imaginative shaping of the Enterprise-D’s android Second Officer and Operations Manager Data of The Next Generation, played by the virtuoso Brent Spiner.
The android Data and four other prototype androids were constructed by Dr. Noonien Soong, also played by Brent Spiner, the reclusive and believed to be deceased cybernetics genius, while the pioneering robotics scientist worked in the early 2330s in a secret laboratory on Omicron Theta. The decisive breakthrough that made it possible for Dr. Soong to create a humanoid android as advanced as Data was his revolutionary development of the positronic brain. This intricate computing device was an artificial intelligence technology for coordinating the dissipation of electron antiparticles into the formation of sophisticated neural nets, enabling a degree of competence in pattern recognition and natural language processing similar to human cognition. Data’s computational hub is housed in a cranial unit composed of duranium metal alloy and cortinide.
The term “positronic brain” was adopted by the producers of The Next Generation as a tribute to American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who used the phrase positronic robotics as early as the 1940s in his many print tales about twenty-first century robots. Included in these short stories and novels was the formulation of Asimov’s well-known Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov was concerned with the self-deprecating ethics of future robots who would be useful tools in positions subordinate to humanity, and who should never resort to the use of deadly force. This emphasis is peripheral to the philosophical issues about the android as a transforming mirror of humanity raised by the most important Next Generation episodes featuring Data, such as The Measure of a Man, The Offspring, Datalore, and Brothers. More pertinent than Asimov to the complex, boundary-interrogating character played by the talented Spiner are the provocative works of the mid-twentieth century science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was adapted into Ridley Scott’s cinematic masterpiece Blade Runner (1982). His short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1965) was the basis for the Verhoeven / Schwarzenegger blockbuster about memory implants and mind-wrenching puzzles of illusion and reality, Total Recall (1990). The Spielberg / Cruise film about “pre-crime,” Minority Report (2002) was inspired by a Philip K. Dick story of the same name.
How can the cyborg’s quest for embodiment or resistance-as-subject (theorized by Donna J. Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles) be complemented by an android hyper-conformist or shadowing resistance-as-object to jointly solve the riddle of authentic difference?
The Star Trek industry typically informs us about what we should think regarding “its” characters, stories, and technologies. As fans, we are told that the “story arc” of the android Data transpires under the sign of his epic efforts to “become human.” But by looking closely at the seminal Next Generation episodes about Data themselves, we see that his poignant struggle is characterized by his retention of a difference from the human, by his always stopping one step short of reaching the alleged goal or becoming identical to it. The seduction proper to the android, which paradoxically lies at the heart of simulation, is “the distance between two things that allows their resemblance” or “the distance between two things that arises when their resemblance is pushed too far.” (Rex Butler) Data is neither different from nor the same as the humans who constructed him. His singular specificity in the doubled situation of being both instances of resemblance to and difference from his creators is the source of his possibilities for altering the system that gave rise to him.
Human nature and the definition of the human are never fixed. This is why the android can be an anamorphic mirror to us, in the sense of enabling the maker to see elements of his true appearance of which he was not aware, and in the sense of inducing an actual transformation in us.
The power to affect and create the real resides with the android, who is neither the same as nor opposed to the human, but rather doubles the human. Artificial Life would be the aperture onto disruptive artistic activities of artifice and illusion that opens when we move beyond the logic of either / or in deliberating questions of identity. In the shadow of the cognitive sciences – artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, neural networks, expert systems, nanotechnology, genetic informatics, reverse engineering of the human brain for use in systems of “extropian” immortality – a new field has emerged called android epistemology. According to its practitioners, this interdisciplinary endeavor is the fitting successor to Plato and Aristotle and the analytical philosophy of mind. It studies the “space of possible machines and their capacities for knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, desires, and actions.” Since the paradigm of information has rendered any difference between humans (or life) and machines pragmatically irrelevant, what becomes paramount for these second-wave pundits of android epistemology is behavior-based, component-oriented, bottom-up AI, which stresses the “processes in the machine, not the stuff it is made of.” (Ford, Glymour and Hayes, Android Epistemology, MIT Press)
The usual Luddite rejoinder to this mainstream techno-scientific undertaking would be to criticize its implicit erasure of the scene of subjectivity that is unique to humans. The humanist respondent would underscore the importance of history, memory, meaning, and experience — those contextual human perceptions and human interpretive frameworks that cannot be reduced to information processing. But such classic counter-arguments ignore the fact that dominant ideas like the brain is a computer, a meat-machine or all reality is digitizable, convertible into digital information are self-fulfilling prophecies. These ideas transfigure not only computer science, but the real itself. For the present study, the problem with the straitlaced version of “android epistemology” of the MIT robotics scientists is not that it goes too far into artificiality, but that it does not go far enough. It does not come close to uncovering the irony and monstrous daring of contingent imagination made possible by the improper breach called Artificial Life.
