Androids in TOS

[Thomas Elliot]

I've watched only a handful of episodes of TOS but I believe that androids may have been a somewhat common encounter in that universe.

Yet, when we see TNG Data is seen as this amazing, unique creation, one of his kind. In hindsight I always thought it was silly that the world of the future had progressed so much and yet there's only one android running around. I guess the rationalization is that Data was the first sentient artificial life form. So where were the non-sentient ones in TNG? I don't think I ever saw any unless they were creations of Dr. Soong, and it was just Lore, and his "mother."

Were the androids in TOS more robotic in thoughts and actions or did they display sentience like Data? How do you square away that lack of non-Soong androids in TNG?

 

[Khan Jr]

The main android episodes are "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", which is weighty, and "I, Mudd", which is comedic but entertaining. A significant character also turns out to unknowingly be an android in "Requiem for Methuselah", and android construction figures into the plot of "Return to Tomorrow", though construction of those specimens is never completed.

The androids in the first of the above episodes are extremely advanced, physically indistinguishable from the species they're modeled on, sentient and capable of emotion. They rebelled against their creators in a war of almost total annihilation that wiped out the civilization.

The android in "Requiem" was one of a string of prototypes made by an immortal savant. Emotion ends up being its downfall, and its creator is very unlikely to build any more. The ones in "Return", from what we saw, were physically primitive.

The ones in the Mudd episode were still free of physical tells, but very limited in their understanding of behavior and emotion. They still have the capacity for large-scale android construction and are friendly with the Federation by the story's end, so this episode is the biggest contradiction to TNG's status quo.

 

[Thomas Elliot]

Okay, that makes sense.
I get why they did it, to make Data unique and not to add too much more complexity to the future society. It's hard enough to write stories where there's no currency involved and people can just live out their fantasies in holodecks. Adding androids being all over the place? And trying to square that with moral righteousness every episode?

 

[Spock's Barber]

Sometimes I wonder if my boss is an android because he’s emotionless, soulless and heartless.

 

[Shawnster]

The ones in the Mudd episode were still free of physical tells, but very limited in their understanding of behavior and emotion. They still have the capacity for large-scale android construction and are friendly with the Federation by the story's end, so this episode is the biggest contradiction to TNG's status quo.

Further, these androids from I, Mudd were not native to our galaxy. They were from the Andromeda galaxy. This might have complicated matters.

Perhaps Soong used some of Flint's or Korby's data in designing Lore, Data, and B4.

 

[StarCruiser]

Sometimes I wonder if my boss is an android because he’s emotionless, soulless and heartless.

I thought that was a requirement of manglement..?

 

[Spock's Barber]

I thought that was a requirement of manglement..?

They also have to prove they’re equivalent to a diaper....full of shit and all over your ass.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I loved The Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely" as a kid. They say you never forget your first fembot, and Alicia was mine. Later, I would have been a dedicated Star Trek fan anyway, but having Andrea (WALGMO) and Rayna on the show didn't hurt one bit. I loved them, too.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Also: "Shore Leave" had robots, including humanoid ones.

 

[johnnybear]

Sometimes I wonder if my boss is an android because he’s emotionless, soulless and heartless.

They're all like that it's in the job description! But you forgot to add inherently evil too my Lord!
JB

 

[Timo]

I think what we have to comprehend here is that Data was never considered "amazing". The eminent expert on the field of robotics laughs at him in "The Schitzoid Man". When discovered by Starfleet, he's cursorily looked at, then dumped, until he crawls back and enrolls at Starfleet Academy - which takes him in without bothering to study any of his inner secrets, and then puts him in apparent menial jobs for more than a decade until Jean-Luc Picard is burdened with this freak on his Federation Flagship with the Amazing Diverse Bridge Crew, along with Starfleet's only Klingon and other freak show performers.

And then Picard and LaForge and the rest discover that Data is in fact a pretty cool guy. But they don't think he's amazing tech, either (that is, they let their decency override their possible curiosity, and never learn about what Data really can do or how he works). They visit his "birthplace" by accident, stumble onto evidence that he's the creation of the man whose face he is wearing, and then deduce that positronics might have something to do with how he's put together. Which is when they apparently write home about it, and this Bruce Maddox guy gets a renewed interest in idle scientific research on him. But he's the bad guy and doesn't get his wish; nobody else cares.

Androids in the TNG era are rare. Sentient artificial life (or what they call Synths in the latest show), even rarer: even though it's a broader category, there's only a single representative as of VOY "Prototype", and that's Data. Plus of course an unknown number of other Soong creations who are hiding (sometimes unawares) and having no effect on history.

This doesn't mean androids would be precious. An equally likely explanation for their rarity is that they are worthless, or perhaps worse than worthless: quite possibly, Man has a deep loathing of Machine Man, just like He has of cloning of all sorts, and has in fact eliminated androids. Not by active pogroms, but by shunning them to death or nonexistence.

Making of androids is not difficult in any Trek era; I wouldn't wonder if Archer's or even Captain Christopher's days featured some. Making of artificial sapience is commonplace in the TNG era. But it's all about attitudes and choices. We today could make flying cars and wristphones and spray-on clothing if we wanted to live through our 1950s fantasy of what life should be like. We don't, either because those are poor ideas in practice, or because our ideas on what life should be like keep on evolving. Or simply because market forces or sheer chance direct our attentions elsewhere.

So by all means let the Federation encounter a dozen distinct types of android, alien or manmade. And then forget all about them, until Noonien Soong needs a cheap and pretty sleeve for his amazing new positronic brain.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MAGolding]

In my opinion any long and highly episodic fiction series, such as TOS, for example, is likely to have a story structure where almost every episodes happens in its own alternate universe. Some episodes will cleary be sequels to other episodes and thus happen in the same alternate universes, but the vast majority of episodes will happen in their own alternate unvierses, and the tens or hundreds of episodes that are produced will be selected from among countless milllions of alternate universes.

I created a thread with a title like "Which Star Trek Productions Happen in the same Universes as Others?" discussing which star trek productinos happen in the same alternate universes as other star trek productions. In that thread there was a post where I discussed which TOS episodes and movies TNG era productions were sequels to. As I remember, "What Are Little Girls Made of?", "Shore Leave", "I, Mudd", and "Requiem for Methuselah" were not listed as episodes that that there was any evidence that TNG era producitns were sequels to.

See post numbers 44 on page three of the thread:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/whi...e-alternate-universes-as-others.298962/page-3

the list of TOS productions that TNG era procuctions seem to be sequels of is:

1) TOS "The Naked Time"
2) TOS "Journey to Babel"
3) TAS episode "Yesteryear"
4) Movie Star Trek VI:The Undiscovered Country
5) Movie Star trek III: The Search for Spock
6) Movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
7) TOS "Space Seed"
8) TOS episode "Operation: Annihilate!"
9) TOS "Elaan of Troyius"
10) TOS "Wolf in the Fold"

And I can add:

11) "The Trouble with Tribbles".

So possibly the various android makers in "What Are Little Girls Made of?", "Shore Leave", "I, Mudd", and "Requiem for Methuselah" wer enever discovered by Kirk, or by Starfleet, or by the Federation, in the alternate universe that led to the TNG era productions. So those androids would be unknown in the era of TNG.

 

[Warped9]

My impression was that Data was the first successful human built android. Ruk in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” was created by an extinct race. Andrea was basically a sex toy for Roger Corby. Brown, I suspect, could have been a lot like Corby where his consciousness was downloaded into an android body. But as advanced as the Corby and Brown androids were something didn’t click when their consciousness were transferred into an android body.

The androids in “I, Mudd” were also alien built, but they didn’t appear quite as advanced as the Corby androids although they did say they could transfer a human “mind” into an android body. Is it possible that the androids from both episodes were actually originally from the same extinct race?

Rayna in “Requiem For Methuselah” could well be what Noonian Soong was striving for in creating Lore and Data. It’s likely Soong wasn’t the only one working on this, but he looks to be the first to replicate and build on what we had seen previously while trying to overcome the failings. But note that Lal (Data’s daughter) might have expired from the same issues as Rayna. And Lore was certainly unstable with his emotions.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Isn’t the positronic brain the thing that sets Data apart from other androids?

 

[Spock's Barber]

They're all like that it's in the job description! But you forgot to add inherently evil too my Lord!
JB

The knife wounds in my back always remind me of how evil they are, JB.

 

[Warped9]

Isn’t the positronic brain the thing that sets Data apart from other androids?

Yeah, I guess thats what is supposed to set Data apart from what came before.

 

[johnnybear]

The knife wounds in my back always remind me of how evil they are, JB.

Same here my friend same here! They are bullies, nothing else can describe them! They're all fiddling the books and love having great power over the workers!
JB

 

[Timo]

I'd like to consider "Return to Tomorrow" as evidence for the building of android bodies being well within the human skill set. Dr. Mulhall takes collective umbrage on behalf of all mankind when Sargon insists that his Ball People build their own android bodies; supposedly, the Enterprise and her valiant crew would have been well set up for building some, too.

Bodies never seem to be the issue: they can be frailer than their human counterparts (say, Mudd's junk in the DSC short), or superior physically (say, Ruk or Data), but all that can be built in there by humans, even if we also witness alien ways of doing it. Our heroes aren't particularly surprised when encountering machine men, after all - save for the plot element of those initially passing for human for nefarious purposes.

Even Soong probably wasn't much concerned with Data's body. He was never quite credited with the wish to do machine men: he was the Positronic Brain Guy, the madman who wanted to Show Them All and build a real, working positronic brain, but had to go to exile after a supposed string of failures. So what he did was test his positronic brain in androids, of varying sorts ranging from silly Pinocchios to perfect human simulacra. And he never got it quite right enough to work up the courage to go public: Lore, Data and Juliana were all a string of not-quite-theres, not fit for release.

The very fact that Data has Soong's face might suggest that building androids is utterly trivial. After all, a machine with the face of Soong would probably be connected directly with Soong long before "Datalore" unless it were plausible that his face was a juvenile prank by somebody else. And you don't do pranks like that if they cost you five fortunes and require the intellectual resources of half a planet.

Certainly Soong came close to creating independently intelligent and sentient life. Whether that really was his goal or not, Maddox seems to have chosen to complete the task, building a species of machines very similar to human(oid)s down to reproductive abilities and the like. It's basically junior league stuff when it comes to AI: the assorted computers and their hologram avatars are already sapient and sentient enough, and well capable of being not merely life but vastly more. But it's a specific pursuit that might hold interest to those dabbling in things like android bodies or AI programs or positronic thinking hardware or whatnot.

A separate pursuit is mind transfer. Ruk's old masters could do some of that. Ira Graves was very much into it. Other such tech seems to be advanced alien stuff that either may be too difficult to reverse-engineer or is lost in the relevant adventures - but if one gets mind transfer down pat, then android bodies are an obvious related industry, an alternative to cloning. But since there's no working mind transfer in the UFP yet, the market for android bodies might really be nil.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[matthunter]

If you can get hold of it, the TNG novel Immortal Coil does an excellent job of folding all of the TOS androids into the story and comparing/contrasting with Data. The upshot is yes, he's more advanced AND the first Federation-made android. There's a "gentleperson's club" of AIs out there monitoring the creation/activity of AIs. Some of these are much less advanced than Data, though at least one is able to masquerade as human. The novel also involves Flint and his relationships with men like Korby and Soong. Even the M-5 computer gets a look-in! The plot surrounds the disappearance of a new "holotronic" android created by Maddox and Barclay (among others).

 

[uniderth]

Isn’t the positronic brain the thing that sets Data apart from other androids?

That was my understanding as well. The positronic technology is what makes Data special.