Star Trek: Get rid of holodecks.

Let me begin by thanking my opponent for his gracious request (in the comments section) to the voters that S&G not be voted on for this debate. I explained my computer problems to readers primarily out of embarrassment, as I knew that round two would be a rough one, but also out of a need to vent my frustration. Pro’s courtesy in this regard is both unexpected and welcome. But now, missa be needin’ gettin’ to round threeso! This is an extremely important round because it is our last opportunity to post new arguments. Before I introduce any new lines of attack, let’s note key components of earlier rounds. Perhaps one of the most important is that Pro admits “None of this is to say the technology should be banned, but it has been proved time and again to be too dangerous on starships where there's no easy off switch, and it doesn't reliably listen to the safe words.” While I don’t agree with the exact wording of his statement above, I note that neither of us thinks the technology in general should be banned; Pro’s problem is only with them being on starships. A statement which might help us clear up some confusion is if we could both agree on the principle “if the drawbacks outweighed the benefits, or if the potential drawbacks were so likely and so severe that they rendered the benefits moot, then in such a case holodecks should not be on starships.” I invite my opponent to agree or disagree with the above statement. I’ll proceed under the assumption that he will most likely agree. I stated the benefits of holodecks at the outset, and the points were largely uncontested. The aspect of holodeck drawbacks has been much more contentious subject in this debate, and so that is where I will continue to devote the majority of my time. Behavior issues, like Barclay not losing holodeck privilages, are supervisory in nature. They are also largely irrelevant to our conversation. That is to say, assuming Barclay’s behavior is that extremely bad (and I don’t think it was), then a much simpler and better approach which could be found by simply asking Geordi LaForge, his commanding officer, to be more strict. One wouldn’t need to go to the lengths of removing all holodecks from all starships to correct such a problem. Indeed, it could create new ones, for angry and now holodeck-less would surely shank Barclay in the rough and tumble deck Ten. The most important drawback is probably that of safety. We have both established that holodeck safety can be compromised in several key ways, but most likely: 1) Accidents caused by safety protocol malfunction. This is very rare, but as I commented earlier, a mountain doesn’t have safeties either. At least on a ship’s holodeck, you are much more likely to finish safely. 2) Spontaneously generated sentience. This odd event does sometimes happen, but when it does it could actually end up being a good thing. Vic Fontane [1] and The Doctor [2] were both benevolent, and their ability to do good things was probably enhanced by their self awareness. Even Professor Moriarty was not malicious. [3] Any cases of conflict between holograms and biological life forms seem to have occurred from the mishandling of relations with a sentient life form, and not necessarily because of the nature of that life form itself. The big ethical problem is not so much in the creation of holographic life forms, but in their mistreatment. Even so, there should be restrictions of what kind of characters crew are allowed to recreationally create in holoprograms just to err on the side of caution. For example, it would probably be a very, very bad idea to run lots of Khan programs. Again though, this could be thought of as a supervisory more than technological issue. 1) http://en.memory-alpha.org... 2) http://en.memory-alpha.org... 3) http://en.memory-alpha.org...