If Robots Could Desire?
If Robots Could Desire?
A sketchy divertissement
A decisive milestone in the advancement of the Artificial Intelligence and of the AI-based automation would not be the replacement of human work with the artificial (robots, algorithms), but the replacement of human desire with an artificial one. One of the often-mentioned effects of the progressive replacement of human work with automation is that of the reduction of market demand: if no one works, no one receives a wage, and no one buys the products. Hence also one of the arguments in favour of the universal basic income, handing people money to buy products and sustain the market demand (the other argument being to let them survive).
But one
could wonder, if market demand needs to be sustained, why not instead push that logic of substitution to the end?, and imagine
that robots replace us not only in work, but also in consumption: that is, to hand
out an income to troops of consumer robots to buy products. After all – from a
certain standpoint, and in particular for the functioning of capitalism – it is
perhaps entirely irrelevant what happens to the products once they are purchased:
if they are directly dumped to the landfill, or incinerated, or consumed to
satisfy needs and desires.
In this
last word lies the starting point to unravel our little thought experiment: the
fact that humans are subjects of desire. In this they are irreplaceable. It is fairly
easy to envision how robots could be built and programmed to replace us at work,
but not how they may desire in our stead.
But why would
an economic system need this molasses of desire at all? Why would it not suffice
to have a set of algorithms assigning some more or less arbitrary systems of
preference to robots, and then letting them make purchases accordingly?
“The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown... What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being … into this [showing a battery].”
If that is the explanation, it is strictly technically preposterous – we’re a lousy source of energy (Carr 2014). We should also not miss to observe that the Wachowskis betray themselves of being aware of the ridiculousness of the proposition. In fact, they add that obscure “combined with a form of fusion”, a rather lazy deus ex machina sci-fi gibberish, signalling that the bioelectric content of human body is not in fact enough, and that some unheard-of form of fusion technology is necessary to yank out the energy. This seems the film’s biggest missed opportunity. Indeed, if the Matrix’s problem were, as Morpheus suggests, to obtain energy intended in the ordinary physical sense, we can easily imagine how, obviously, the machines could have efficiently produced and procured themselves such energy on their own (from fossil, nuclear, and even renewable sources), given their advanced level of technological-industrial capabilities shown in the film, and could have completely got rid of humans. Still, they don't. Instead, they “grow” humans.
Beyond explaining this diegetic inconsistency by a pure narrative opportunism (the film without humans would be of little interest), closest to a possible solution of the puzzle, which would admittedly make The Matrix a much better film, probably comes Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Fiennes 2006), when he suggests that it must be a completely different kind of "energy": the libido, libidinal energy, which basically is not too far from what we are saying: desire.
To get
closer to an answer we need to employ René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, together
with a side analytical distinction between needs and desires. With that, we
could arrive at the understanding that the market proposes itself (it proposes
itself in the sense that it aspires to be, and in the sense that it can appear
to us and have the effect on us) as a comprehensive social mechanism of
construction, quantification, and exchange of desire in the form of measurable
quantities of value: prices, wages, profits, ... In short, the mimetic
hypothesis helps us understand that the market is constituted as a social but
a-personal system of creation, valuation and exchange of desire, as André
Orléan was suggesting in his insightful book The Empire of Value (2014). In such a system, the personal worth (of
the capitalist, of the worker) can be said to be measured through the share of
the "socially produced desire" which each participant succeeds in
appropriating in the form of a monetary quantity. If the capitalists (the owners
of the means of production, which include the rent on cognitive capital, what
Marx called the “general intellect”) reaped their profits from the sales of their
products to robots, in these profits there would be not a shred of condensed
desire, it would simply be a fruit of a more or less arbitrary algorithm of
choice, and not a quantifiable substantiation of someone’s desire. In short,
the capitalists themselves would find no "value" in this. In the same
way no one values having fake likes or followers on social networking platforms,
given by bots or bought from click farms [1]. So, following Girard, capitalists
want to acquire and “accumulate” other’s desire, in the form of some symbolic
token that represents it, because they are themselves desiring subjects. And
the capitalists are in competition for exactly that, who can “suck” (in The
Matrix the sucking is literal) more (symbolic tokens of) desire from
others.
So, we may
say that the “success” of the system of market exchange resides in its apparent
ability to literally materialise the vanishing substance of desire, by offering
its socially shared material representation and quantification, and the possibility of its accounting,
exchange and transfer, together with the conspicuous signalling of social distinctions
(putting together Veblen (1899) with Bourdieu (1979)). If that is so, we can ascertain
the naivety of the standard and stale diagnosis of the resilience (actually,
antifragility) of the capitalist market economy, as being due to the
spontaneous individualism and, in a more unsophisticated variant, due to individual
“greed”, suggesting perhaps that a mass conversion to some less egotistic (or
pop-buddist?) individual consciousness would be required to supersede it. Herculean
though that may be, it would still be easy stuff. Because what if, rather than in our
being spontaneously and naturally hyper-individualists – and without forgetting
Karl Polanyi’s great lesson on the creation of the “market society” (Polanyi 1944) –, that spontaneous component of the
success of the market exchange actually resided instead in our being hyper-social?
The
argument of monetary exchange representing transfers of desire may also shed
light on the other side of the coin of the debate on the universal basic
income. After all, one of the critiques of the UBI is the argument that people need
to “realise” and fulfil themselves, to find a purpose, or at least a sense of
individual usefulness, through work. But what exactly is this "realisation",
fulfilment, and purpose? Of having contributed to exactly what? Can we not acknowledge
that work indeed may be a path to such a fulfilment and purpose, but still hold
that work as social relation can be separated and made independent from the monetary
transaction of wage receiving?
One
unsettling possibility though may be closer to the reading we’re proposing here,
ultimately by seeing that the value of work-cum-wage resides precisely
in that successful "capture" of some quantity of someone’s desire, established
and registered by that monetary transaction of receiving a wage. That
transaction embodies the fact that some other desires the fruits of your
labour, and hence (freely) decides to pay you a wage, that is, to transfer a (quantifiable
monetary) amount of desire from him/her to you. And thus, roughly following
Girard, filling your “lack of being” by exactly that quantifiable amount. Far
from being this a naive fetishism of money, should the market mechanisms
penetrate all spheres of social relations (Sandel 2012), and if we accept the idea of money
as a token quantifying desire and the money supply as the aggregate “socially
produced/available desire”, then that Other paying you a wage would not merely be
partaking in your “being”, it would be the very act of its creation.
Reasoning in
this fashion throws an interesting light on Marx's idea of the fetishism of commodity/money.
Žižek (1989) correctly observes, that it is not the
money that is the fetish here, since it is nothing but a condensation of social
relations, a piece of paper that gives you the entitlement to a share of the
social product. So, when we ask ourselves where fetishism lies, the answer must
be that it lies in the social reality itself, and in the ideological substratum
that sustains it, what we are, and what we do. But we also need to supplement Žižek’s
point with our earlier thesis that – at least once the productive forces allow
a reasonable satisfaction of the basic biological needs necessary for the survival
– it is the mechanisms of (mimetic) desire which feed the market dynamics and
the economic processes and relationships, through which that social reality takes
material form.
And since we’re at Marx, another observation is in order. If we proceed with such extension of Marx, isn’t the mechanism he imagined to be the end of capitalism a curious modality of what we're saying? Take his hypothesis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, due to a progressive diminishing of the “surplus of value” with increasing mechanisation, driven by competition between capitalists, which in the long run affects the "organic composition of capital" – the proportion between labour and capital, the latter nowadays including software and robots? Is not our mechanism a possible account of what Marx himself imagined? In fact, in our hypothesis, should we give robots money also to consume following some arbitrary algorithm of choice, the profit in the strict sense may not disappear, but the "surplus of value" does, being though that missing "surplus value" not the lack of (socially necessary) labour-time extracted from workers, but the lack of desire extracted from consumers! Indeed, if a comprehensive automated production is ahead of us, fully substituting all human wage-earning work, a comprehensive universal basic income may be, as already Van Parijs (1995) was suggesting, the only way to save capitalism from the jeopardies of its own success.
Our idea of
a series of substitutions, of machines first replacing us as workers and then as
consumers, may though have one last step, that of machines also substituting
the capitalists. To pay homage to another film, we can call this the Skynet
hypothesis. In the third instalment of the Terminator franchise (Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines, 2003), the artificial neural-network group mind Skynet,
developed by the US military, goes online and, as its first act after reaching
self-awareness, launches an all-out nuclear attack on the Earth in attempt to
exterminate humans.
A comparison
between our Matrix hypothesis and the Skynet hypothesis may indeed clarify few things.
As we saw, in the Matrix the “desire substance” is acknowledged and plays the
key role, up to raising the suspicion we mentioned before, of Matrix being a
gargantuan and unified ultimate device, set up by other humans, for a centralised,
seamless and hyper-efficient “extraction” of desire, which, as it were, is probably
the monopolistic capitalism brought to its logical conclusion. Instead, in
Skynet, the machines – we are told – reach autonomous self-awareness, and
arrive at the quite reasonable conclusion that the humans are a nuisance at
best, and a jeopardy for their survival at worst, and hence decide to do away
with them. There being no desiring subjects at the top or behind the Skynet
once it acquires autonomy, the human desire can be done away with.
* * *
But what if I'm wrong?
What if robots could come to desire? To paraphrase a memorable Bentham’s passage, the key question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they desire?
Could we think of an (evolutionary) mechanism through which synthetic desire emerges?
A way to try to imagine that could be starting from needs. If we give an elementary definition of a “need” as something necessary for the survival and integrity of a system (be it biological or cybernetic), then we can quite obviously talk about needs of robots, at least of those who have acquired an adequate degree of autonomy together with the self-evolved or pre-programmed goal of survival and self-preservation. Mechanical/behavioural autonomy is sufficient here, no need to presuppose any “deep” self-awareness or consciousness. Such an autonomous robot could be said to have needs, for instance for energy, batteries, spare parts, but also for possible enhancements, protheses, upgrades, and so on. And if we gave it an income to let it procure those things on the market, its consumption choices would no longer be driven by an arbitrary algorithm, as we imagined at the beginning, but by those needs. In this way we could also have an actual competition between capitalists, since there now are clear “market-based” terms for product comparison and emergence of systems of preferences in robots, and hence a proper market demand and competition among producers.
Besides incorporating those parts and products in themselves, the robots could also come to use them for procreation. They could, why shouldn’t they?, start building their children. To pay homage to yet another sci-fi classic, such a children-fabrication brings us to a possible better use of the term "replicants", since sexual reproduction may not be necessary, but embedding in robots some kind of replication drive could be evolutionary advantageous.
An
interesting question, which we will not pursue further here, is why then in the
film Blade Runner 2049 do the replicants strive
to reproduce sexually? If not again a fruit of lazy narrative opportunism, why
should the capability of sexual reproduction, according to their own report in
the film, be an ultimate proof of replicants’ ontological status of non-merely-machines? Since nonsexual reproduction through
fabrication could work just as well, does it hint that it is there where the metaphysical
desire to be like humans resides? We do not get the answer to that question in
the film, likely because it may be unanswerable [2].
Be that as
it may, Blade Runner is of interest here for envisioning a third
hypothesis on the possible progression of the relationship between humans and
robots, that of not only co-evolution, but of progressive blurring of boundaries
and differences. In the first instalment of Blade Runner (1982), this doubt
is presented in a more abstract, nuanced and arguably sophisticated terms. In
fact, the film does not delve much on an exposition of the “ontological”
differences between replicants and humans, the doubt is not so much staged
through protagonists’ utterances, but through their deeds and ethical choices,
up to leaving the uncertainty, to say the least, about the superior moral
character of humans vis-à-vis replicants (and of the ambiguous blade runner Rick
Deckard vis-à-vis the redeemed replicant leader Roy Batty). As memorable, moving,
and majestically delivered by Rutger Hauer it may be, the ending Roy’s soliloquy
“Tears in rain” on memories lost is ultimately a red herring, what counts as the
true “proof” in the film’s finale is Roy’s self-sacrifice to save Dekard’s life
and, in it, his definitive repudiation of violence. So, in what we could call an
ethical Turing test, we get de-ontology as an ontological proof.
Instead, in
the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, the blurring and “line crossing” between
humans and replicants is literally staged through its embodiment in the
possibility of sexual crossbreeding between humans and replicants. In fact, in
the denouement of the film it is revealed [spoiler alert] that Dr. Ana Stelline
is the child of human-replicant relationship between Rachel and Deckard [3]. So, as it were, sex as an ontological proof.
In any case, the mimetic capability of robots as a behavioural pattern could emerge plainly out of the needs described above: not just the literal imitation of behaviours but also the imitation of needs – we could call this “mimetic need” – could emerge as an effective evolutionary strategy for quicker learning from robot’s peers, for instance for discovering which components from which companies work better, which are more efficient, robust, durable, and so on. So in that way the robots could begin to imitate each other’s “desire” for things. And from this ignition point, we could easily imagine the emergence of rudimentary Girardian patterns (robots becoming rivals and obstacles to each other, mutual aggression, and violence [4]), of social organisation and political structuring (differences in capabilities, wealth, status, power, and so on), and possibly even forms of speciation.
Taken such
Girardian patterns at a purely phenomenological level, how far are we here from
the microphysics of human (mimetic) desire? Should we conclude that that is all
there is, or should we rather hold that such a cybernetically evolved (mimetic)
need is ultimately lacking in some ways to match all the properties of (mimetic)
desire? Should we be suspicious of the purely phenomenological parallelisms and
formal homologies, must we not then arrive to claim an altogether different
ontological status of desire? Or is that which takes the form of what we
designate as desire really special only for us, because it is the form it takes
in us as desiring subjects? Or, another fascinating hypothesis which can
perhaps be deemed as a form of radical Girardian-Durkheimian realism, does that
special status of desire reside not in its strictly immanent properties, but is
rather a purely virtual operator necessary to sustain social relationships?
This is likely
yet another set of unanswerable questions. But in a funny twist, some may be,
so to say, empirically testable. If we pursue with our hypothesis of the market
economy as a social mechanism of transubstantiation of desire, thriving
precisely on its unanswerable ontological distinctiveness, then our test would be
to see if the capitalists – the Fredersens, Tyrells, Weyland-Yutanis, Shelby Forthrights, … – of the
future happily embrace that cybernetic “synthetic need/desire” we were
describing before, and thrive on their mutual mimetic competition, on who can
capture the greatest amount of it, possibly discarding the rest of the humanity
to a dump, or doing away with it through a human-controlled Skynet.
Or, second
hypothesis, if they will instead continue to only value our “organic desire”, possibly
making the process of its capture and accumulation ever more efficient, perhaps
through a Matrix-like superstructure.
Or, third
hypothesis, if there may occur “line crossings” and blurring of differences, and
a subsequent co-evolution, which of course we have no reason to believe would
play out harmoniously, as Blade Runner 2049 presages [5], and the possible sequel may
stage as an all-out class struggle between replicants and humans (should such an
insipid movie idea pop into Ridley Scott’s mind).
So, in a
way, our empirical test of an ontological question about the status of desire
may come as an apocalyptic revelation of the way in which things will tip, as
it were, Skynet or Matrix or Blade Runner.
* * *
Unanswerable though it may be, and sitting it out until the empirical
test ensues, at which point the owl of Minerva will have already spread its
wings, we can still try to characterise the deadlock in our question through one
last example; admittedly with a too lengthy an exposition, so bear with me.
There is an
impurity – or a surplus – in Marcel Duchamp's gesture of the urinal. As if in
it, Duchamp minimally restrains and holds himself back, invaded by a dimension
of prudery.
The gesture
is well known, that of showing that the work of art is not such because of
its immanent properties (the content), but for the purely formal effect of the
position it occupies in a structure (the form). On that relationship between
content and form, Duchamp's intent is obviously to mark the possibility and the
immediacy of shifting from one dimension to another, as it were, from an
excremental to a sublime one. If this is the case, the first thought that may
pop to one’s mind is that, of course, the place of the urinal must have been
occupied by the Thing itself – by an excrement.
Yet instead
of an excrement, Duchamp serves us a urinal. Why? Here we can fantasise the
artist seeing his great opportunity of a slam dunk, but nevertheless restrains himself
by a sense of prudery, and falls back onto a more “polite” surrogate: the
urinal instead of a piece of shit.
And yet
there are problems with such a purely "etiquetteological"
interpretation of Duchamp's procedure. The urinal is far from a perfect
substitute, it is not strictly zero-content, the pure entropic obliteration of
matter an excrement would have stood for. Although perhaps prosaic, in the
urinal a content abundantly persists, not only in the obvious common sense of
being an object of design, conceived, designed, and built with a purpose to
serve, but also because it is a "curious" object. Digging a little
deeper, we should also not overlook its phantasmatic and symbolic dimension.
Consider, for example, that for about half of our species the urinal is
universally quite an enigmatic entity. Its perplexing nature does not lie in
the fact that it is a "masculine" object, we all have a demystified
relationship with "gendered" objects through domestic confidence, for
example women with shaving foams, and men with menstrual products. But the
urinal is not something found in promiscuous domestic environments, but
exclusively in public ones, and for a penisless the experience of a urinal (except
for those whose work is to produce, or to clean them!) is that of a fleeting
stolen gaze in the passages of public toilets towards the women's rest rooms,
or better, of a fateful "gaze not avoided" on an alternative, ghostly
dimension.
Moreover,
there is a wealth of constructive varieties and styles of urinals, and it would
not be entirely impossible to imagine, in the wake of similar exhibitions of oddities
and quirks, that a certain not so small public would be attracted to an
exhibition or a museum of urinals. (This, by the way, would be an amusing
overturning of the Duchampian procedure, a urinal that from the
object-exception becomes an ordinary genre of figurative art; which, chances
are, isn’t so far from the status of some post-Duchampian art.)
So, to
return to our question, why? What can we gather from Duchamp's apparent
indecision, from his apparent failure to go "all the way", and
instead of exposing the urinal, to serve us... a piece of shit? Our first attempt
to answer this was that it is nothing more than a mere contingency, precisely
an excess of prudery that ultimately weakens – as it were "dirties" –
the work of art. But eventually, we need to deem this answer unsatisfactory, in
terms of the underlying theme of the relationship between content and form, since
it presupposes the naive realism of a strict separation and independence of one
from the other.
Instead, what
if Duchamp were here again a step ahead, and if his "discovery" lays in
the fact that the variant with the urinal is precisely the one required to
reflect the necessary relationship, we could properly say dialectical, between the
content and the form? The counterexample should confirm this second way of
seeing things: would an installation in which the place of the urinal is
occupied by an excrement produce the same formal effect? Presumably not. That
minimal functional content in the urinal indeed seems indispensable, something
that already is, and only then can become something else, as soon as it
is framed and placed in a museum, that is, as soon as it comes to occupy a specific
position in a new formal structure.
The implications of such an interpretation are numerous. Starting from the homology with the condition of Data, the android from the glorious Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Data “wants” to become human, with all the tics and irrationalities, but also with all the creativity and – Data's true obsession – human emotions. Here, after stumbling upon one of those unanswerable questions we were mentioning before, the wisdom of the Star Trek authors was their choice not to make it happen, not to get stuck in a melodramatic filmic staging of a transformation of an android into a human. And in not letting him ever quite make this leap, we find in Data one of the sweetest and most tender objections to Pascal's method ("Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc.", Pensées 233). Indeed, Data puts in practice a permanent and increasingly sophisticated strategy of imitating humans, "by acting as if he believed", and yet the passage never quite happens. So much so that, as much as we sympathise with the character, we realise that his is nothing but a mechanical repetition, imitation, emulation [6]. Here, on this level runs our homology: Data in Star Trek and the excrement in our alternative Duchamp occupy homologous positions: a nothing from which nothing – neither the form, nor the structure – can make the dynamism of a dialectical procedure to ignite and departure. A minimal content, a surplus, Duchamp seems to suggest, would be indispensable in both cases. And it is rather ironic that Duchamp perhaps stumbles upon this discovery by secretly harbouring prudery and honouring a minimal code of good manners, that apparently only repressive agency, which in his case repressed the excrement to gives us the urinal. This, by the way, should prompt us to always wonder what, in what may appear as a pure formalism or an empty ritual, is the minimal element of “content”; after all, in a peculiar way, this ultimately was Girard’s greatest discovery.
The wrap-up
will be disappointing. The question if desire may emerge from (cybernetic) need
is possibly one modality of the question of “something out of nothing”. Unanswerable
though it may be, eventually, we have perhaps arrived at an unremarkable result
of reframing the question in the form: is there some minimal special essence in
desire, and required for desire to emerge, or can it rather emerge – from shit?
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction:
critique sociale du jugement. Éditions de Minuit.
Carr,
Kevin. 2014. «Was the Matrix Even Necessary in ‘The Matrix’?» Film School
Rejects. 8 gennaio 2014.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/was-the-matrix-even-necessary-in-the-matrix-c64070985674/.
Fiennes,
Sophie. 2006. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Mischief Films, Amoeba
Film.
Greenfield,
Adam. 2018. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Verso.
Orléan,
André. 2014. The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for Economics. MIT
Press.
Parijs,
Philippe van. 1995. Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify
Capitalism? Clarendon Press.
Polanyi,
Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Sandel,
Michael J. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.
London: Macmillan.
Veblen,
Thorstein. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the
Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan.
Žižek,
Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.
Notes
[1] The Girardian reading of the practice of purchasing followers and likes from click farms is fairly straightforward. You do not buy them for their intrinsic value, but only to create the appearance of having followers and likes, in order to mimetically kindle in others the desire to follow and like you. That is also why such reputation faking should never be revealed, and are scandalous once discovered, revealing the vanity of the perpetrator in plain sight. Companies managing social networking platforms know all too well where the true value resides, and are good at purposefully engineering what needs to be hidden from the plain sight, and at monetising it. Curiously, and not without some implications for our argument, social networking companies call those real followers and likes “organic”.
[2] As an aside, there perhaps exist three types
of unanswered questions in the works of fiction: those that don’t get answered
because the authors are foolishly unaware that there actually is a question to
be answered, those in which the authors are too clumsy and lazy to answer the
question, and those in which the question, even if only implied, is in fact
unanswerable. Foolishness, clumsiness, and laziness may all be entertaining to
observe and watch unfolding, but the interest of the latter type is not
strictly in not answering questions, but in narrowing down and pinpointing where
the deadlock in those questions resides: to again ransack Žižek, greater
purpose may sometime come not from providing all of the answers, but by asking
the right questions.
[3] Aptly, Ana Stelline is a freelance “replicant
memory designer” hired by the Tyrell Corporation to design fake memories to be
implanted into replicants’ minds. She is likely the best, as is suggested in the
script:
K: “You
make memories, that go into Replicants. They say you make the best”.
Ana: “Then they’re kind.”
K: “You
work for Wallace.
Ana: “Subcontract. I’m one of his suppliers. He offered to buy me out,
I take my freedom where I can find it."
[4] An interesting question for a Girardian
scholar is whether something like scapegoat mechanism could also emerge out of
such cybernetic “mimetic need”. Should the answer be negative, the follow-up
question would then be why does it emerge in human context? Because there is
something special in the status of desire vis-a-vis need?, or because there is
some missing ingredient in the basic mimetic model, and hence there is formally
necessary something else to be at play or operating, so that scapegoating
emerges spontaneously as a mode of appeasement of rivalries and of resolution
of mimetic crises?
[5] Closest to a Girardian insight comes K's
superior Lt. Joshi, who fears that, rather than the cause of a gullible universal
epiphany, the possibility of crossbreeding, and of replicants’ sexual reproduction
among themselves, that is to say the vanishing of differences, could lead to a
war between humans and replicants. As she puts it:
“The world’s built on a wall that separates
kind.
Tell either side there’s no wall --
you bought a war -- or a slaughter.”
[6] Data, which we find out is “fully functional”,
has been also asked to have sexual intercourse with at least one crew member, and
Data diligently obliged. In the third episode of the first season, “The Naked
Now”, we see Chief Security Officer Lt. Tasha Yar seducing Data, and in a later
scene telling him that “it never happened”. If there’s a whole bunch of people
saying that to Data, is open to speculation.
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