MICHAEL GROTHAUS, Fast Company; Patrick Stewart was thinking about AI ethics years before ChatGPT launched
The accomplished thespian was well-versed in the humanities, but he was also keen to consider the moral questions surrounding technology.
"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.”"
