Star Trek: Untangling The Problematic Morality Surrounding Holographic Lifeforms

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The Star Trek franchise has invented a plethora of fictional technologies, from the fundamental warp drive to medical tricorders capable of detecting any injury after a quick scan. Of all the fantastic gadgets and gizmos, one of the most entertaining has to be the holodeck, an artificial reality containing anything one's heart can program. The holograms found within are created to look, feel, sound, and even smell real, from gourmet feasts to holographic people, looking and acting like real lifeforms — a huge leap from the holograms of today.

In true Westworld fashion, the moral ambiguity about whether these holographic projections are alive or not is at the philosophical heart of many episodes. Sentience within synthetic beings is a concept toyed with by Gene Roddenberry and the writers of Star Trek, focusing heavily on Data and his quest to become human, but they were also fascinated with how this could apply to holograms. Going chronologically from the time of release, the first instance of this within a hologram comes during season 2 of The Next Generation, where the ships head of engineering Geordi La Forge (played by the once promised, never given Jeopardy host LeVar Burton) accidentally gives the fictional Sherlock Holmes nemesis Moriarty enough computing power to become sentient, causing him to become self-aware to the extent that he gains control of the ship.

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The other most notable example is the Doctor (not a Doctor of the Who variety) from Star Trek: Voyager, starting «life» as the ship's EMH, or Emergency Medical Hologram, a hologram designed to take over the ship's doctor for short amounts of time or in the case of emergency.