In the Star Trek universe, only the Federation is shown as capable of making such a leap of a moral imagination to conclude that a artificially intelligent machine of Data's sophistication is in effect a sentient being. I see this episode as presenting the clearest picture of the best nature of the Federation. It raised the question of whether a commissioned officer in Starfleet could be vivisected against his will, and then took most of an hour to figure out the answer. This episode is one of several which painted a bleak picture of the state of civil rights in the Federation - inadvertantly, I presume. Will the sex holograms that are in Quark's be considered people too? Fentoro 05:07, 10 March 2007 (UTC) Isn't this a tad bit of a fictional slippery slope? The Doctor in voyager was labled a human too.

Rabbi Ashkanazi's answer, by the way, was 'no', based on some technicalities in the rules governing minyans.

Considered by itself, the question seems silly, but what is really being asked is 'Is an artificially created intelligent being really human?' That has been a recurring question in speculative fiction ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and would become a very real question if we were to develop an artificial intelligence that could pass the Turing Test. This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.ДЄ late 17th-early 18th century rabbi, Zvi Ashkanazi, asked 'Can a golem be a member of a minyan?' A golem is an artificially created intelligent life form, and a minyan is ten or more adult male Jews gathered for prayer. This article has been rated as C-Class on the project's quality scale. Science Fiction Wikipedia:WikiProject Science Fiction Template:WikiProject Science Fiction science fiction articles

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Star trek a measure of a man