Yesterday, the world lost one of its great thespians. Sir Patrick Stewart, known on stage for his riveting portrayals of Shakespeare’s characters and, more broadly, for his film portrayals of the X-Men’s Professor X, passed away after a short battle with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
But of course, the role Stewart is best known for is playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran for seven seasons from 1987 to 1994.
Unlike other sci-fi of the time, particularly the more popular Star Wars, Star Trek: The Next Generation often explored the philosophical and social aspects of technology, with many of its most memorable episodes addressing the moral implications of scientific progress.
One particular episode, “The Measure of a Man,” from 1989, saw Stewart’s Picard make an impassioned plea and legal argument that his friend, the artificially intelligent android Data, played by Brent Spiner, should not be considered Starfleet property but a sentient being with the associated rights all individual sentient beings have.
This, of course, was decades before artificial intelligence went from being science fiction to science fact in our 21st-century world. But it’s not the only time Stewart contemplated the technology and its moral implications.
In 2014, Stewart gave an interview to Smithsonian magazine in which he, perhaps the most popular science fiction captain ever, was asked his opinion on the then-burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, and whether any future AI beings should have the same rights as humans.
At the time, Stewart was no longer just an accomplished actor. He was also in his tenth year as the Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield in the United Kingdom, a position he held from 2004 to 2015 (before continuing his relationship with the university as its Emeritus Chancellor).
During the time of Stewart’s chancellorship, the University of Huddersfield was known for its engineering and applied research programs and today runs an Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence.
In his answer, Stewart reflected on “The Measure of a Man” episode:
“I remember at one script conference, Whoopi Goldberg, during the period when she was with us on the show, saying what we ought to make clear in this—that we’re actually talking about slavery,” Stewart recalled. “And it was a great point to make. If we create independent life but keep it under our control, what is that? It can be said to be a form of slavery.”
But he continued: “I hope that the moral questions will be addressed as enthusiastically as technical questions will be addressed when it comes to artificial intelligence.”
A true Renaissance thespian
For anyone who is a fan of Stewart’s work, it’s little surprise the accomplished thespian, well-versed in the humanities, was always keen to consider the moral questions surrounding technology, particularly, in this instance, artificial intelligence.
Of course, despite some AI engineers reportedly believing they are creating a god, the AI that exists today still seems a far way off from being truly sentient, and thus deserving of rights. And it is nothing like the benevolent android Data. Instead, today’s moral questions about artificial intelligence revolve around its impact on jobs, social cohesion, mental health, privacy, and its use in warfare.
Yet some of those questions were also on Stewart’s mind more than a dozen years ago, and over more than half a decade before chatbots like ChatGPT launched.
“I’m fascinated by this technology. I’m happy to say that my university is in the forefront of this kind of research,” Stewart told Smithsonian in 2014, before adding, “And I’m excited by that but . . . in the same way that we’ve had to start asking questions about personal liberty, and what is the nature of privacy as social networking and aspects of reality television and exposures become more and more successful and money-making, we have now to look at what is the nature of privacy and what can one expect as a right.”
If only we had someone like Captain Picard to help us navigate the artificial-intelligence uncertainty ahead.
