The Synth Ban wasn't just about the Attack on Mars
The Synth Ban wasn't just about the Attack on Mars
It is one of the most dire aspects of Star Trek Picard: a long-running ban (under "galactic treaty") that eliminates not only research into synthetic life, but appears to ban synthetic lifeforms themselves.
And, candidly, I don't think it's an element of the story that is plainly justified on first read. It appears incredibly -- to the point of being implausibly -- reactionary, to an extent that we haven't seen from the Federation before. It also stretches credulity that a single event -- no matter how catastrophic -- could lead to such a long-lasting draconian policy. For it to be believable, we really need to assume that the Federation already was morally corrupt and weak-willed in a way that makes it in turn seem hard to believe that people of good character like Picard could hold the Federation in such high esteem. (Of course, there is ample evidence that the Federation, or at least Starfleet, has been immoral in this area for quite some time.) This is worsened, of course, by the sudden turnaround at the season's end wherein the ban is lifted, with apparently very little effort.
It's a weakness of storytelling in PIC S1. But, when we start to layer in stories from other series, a new picture emerges.
Let's work backwards. From PIC, we know what happens in 2385:
2385: in the Attack on Mars, rogue synths surreptitiously hijacked by the Romulan anti-AI extremist group known as the “Zhat Vash” lead a devastating attack on Mars, destroying the colonies, the Utopia Planitia shipyards, and the Romulan Rescue armada. Romulan involvement remains unknown for years after.
2385: a political crisis erupts following the Attack on Mars, with at least fourteen Federation members threatening secession. Starfleet chooses to abandon the evacuation mission, and Admiral Picard resigns in protest. Soon thereafter, a wide-ranging interstellar treaty – signed by so many powers that it was sometimes described as a “galactic treaty” – bans research, construction, and even the mere presence of synthetic lifeforms. Dr. Bruce Maddox flees the Federation shortly after and settles on Coppelius with Altan Soong.
Prior to that, PRO tells us about 2382-2384ish:
2382 (speculative): the Protostar launches under the command of Captain Chakotay, an experimental vessel equipped with a new propulsion technology called “proto-warp”, on a mission to return to the Delta Quadrant.
(PRO seems intentionally vague on the exact timing of this launch; potentially it could be placed as far back as 2378, or even maybe as late as 2384.)
2383 (speculative): Construction of the Romulan Rescue armada at Utopia Planitia is underway.
(The timing of the fleet construction is vague, but I argue it needs to be early enough such that the attack in 2385 creates a setback too large to recover from. As I recall, PIC is a little unclear on whether it would have been feasible to rebuild the fleet in time after the attack. But for there to be such severe political blowback, I think the project needed to have been underway for at least a couple of years.)
2383: following temporal displacement, the Protostar is discovered and commandeered by Dal R’El and his crew.
2384: the Dauntless, under the command of Vice Admiral Janeway and equipped with a (limited) quantum slipstream drive, embarks on a search for Captain Chakotay and the Protostar.
2384: the Battle of the Living Construct wreaks a heavy toll on the gathered Starfleet armada, which includes the starships Defiant, Centaur, Sovereign, and possibly Enterprise, as a viral AI hijacks starships via communication transmission and pits them against one another. The crew of the Protostar destroy the ship to terminate the signal and end the battle.
2384: full production of the Protostar class commences
There are two things to highlight here. First, this now marks the second instance of a destructive AI within as many years. It's unclear from PRO's finale how many ships are destroyed, but it is eerily reminiscent of the Attack on Mars a year later.
Second, the early 2380s saw the release of not one but two experimental FTL technologies, to say nothing of the use of sentient holograms as crew members. And yet none of that seems present by PIC S3 -- perhaps an illustration of the profound impact of the destruction of Utopia Planitia (and the all-but-certain brain drain as thousands of Starfleet designers perished).
Finally, we come to LDS' contribution to the tale of the early 2380s:
2381: the Battle of the Texas Trio, in which three autonomous Texas-class starships go rogue due to the malfunction of the AI known as “Badgey”. Before being stopped by a fleet of California-class starships, the “Texas Trio” carried out a devastating attack with significant loss of life, including that of Vice Admiral Buenamigo, who led the development of the Texas class.
That marks three rogue AI catastrophes in four years, with consecutively higher costs each time, culminating in what appears to be the destruction of an entire generation of technology development and Starfleet researchers, whose loss still appears apparent fifteen years later.
The Synth Ban wasn't just a reaction to the Attack on Mars -- it was a reaction to half a decade of AI disasters. No doubt the Ban was encouraged both explicitly and implicitly by Romulan (and Zhat Vash) elements, and even within this broader context, the Ban is still an overreaction. But the Attack on Mars "struck while the iron was hot", at a time when the Federation populace would be more anti-AI than at any point in history.
As a topic for a separate post, but the more I look at the pre-2385 vs post-2385 stories, the more stark a shift I see, and the more potential for potent storytelling becomes apparent. The Attack on Mars and the Romulan Supernova became a generation-defining event: the 9/11 of its time, separating the 90s-esque optimism of TNG, LDS, and PRO, from the 2000s-2010s-esque troubled times of the Synth Ban and PIC.
The attack on Mars killed over 90 000 people, destroyed the Romulan evacuation fleet, destroyed the most significant fleetyards in Starfleet, and set the planet's atmosphere on fire for at least the next 19 years. It's an incredibly significant event, and I honestly think that it alone would be a plausible reason to suspend AI research.
appears to ban synthetic lifeforms themselves.
This part, though, has never sat right with me. It deserves a lot more examination than the line or two we got in the season.
appears to ban synthetic lifeforms themselves.
This part, though, has never sat right with me. It deserves a lot more examination than the line or two we got in the season. Right, and that's part of my point. The suspension of research I agree is one thing, and is better justified in the show. But the outright banning of synths is racist and reeks of fascist regimes in a way that, I agree, is completely underexamined in the show.
My point is that we can recontextualize the Synth Ban into something that isn't a reaction to a single event but is rather a reaction to a series of mounting crises. I'm not saying that it puts the Federation in a better light, but to me it makes it more believable.
To draw a potentially provocative comparison: if the Attack on Mars is 9/11, then the Battle of the Living Construct is the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the Battle of the Texas Trio is the 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center. And I'd argue that those are important pieces of historical context to understand the reaction to 9/11; 9/11 punctuated the emerging narrative from 1990s terrorism that the world Was No Longer Safe.
Setting aside the plausibility questions though, one way or another the franchise has established this series of three AI catastrophes in short order (to say nothing of DSC's Control Crisis, nor PIC S3's use of interlinked starships); whether or not they needed to do this to justify the Synth Ban is, I agree, debatable. But yeah -- intentionally or not, they do seem to have created a more complex backstory here.
we can recontextualize the Synth Ban into something that isn’t a reaction to a single event but is rather a reaction to a series of mounting crises.
I do agree with this. I'm not sure it's necessary, but whether it was intentional or not, the dots are there to connect.
I don't think you're wrong by any means, but I also wanted to throw in the treatment of the Mark-1 EMH programs that were for some reason reassigned to dangerous work instead of literally any other kind of retirement in 2375
According to their creator, Dr. Zimmerman,
"I tried to have them decommissioned, but Starfleet in its infinite wisdom overruled me and reassigned them all to work waste transfer barges..."
We also know that the reassigned EMH Mark 1s get bootleg copies of The Doctor's holonovel Photons Be Free in 2378. Assuming a revolt took place (sadly nothing of the sort is ever confirmed, but it isn't out of the realm of possibility), this would be one more reason leading to the eventual synth ban.
Oh that's a really good point about the Holo-Revolt. And it's interesting -- now that you draw attention to it, I don't think we have seen any holograms serving on ships we see on LDS. I wonder if a Holo-Revolt did happen and lead to Starfleet banning holographic officers... with Chakotay and Admiral Janeway managing to lobby for a one-off exception for the Protostar given a) the exceptional circumstances of returning to the Delta Quadrant and b) Janeway's personal desire to never return to the Delta Quadrant but Chakotay insisting that her expertise was indispensable. Holo-Janeway could have been a one-off compromise.
... so, Romulans were running the show. The Romulans believed that the mere existence of synthetic life would lead to the being(s) from outside the galaxy being called to raze all organic life in the galaxy. So, yeah. Of course, that's what they did.
(of course, it turns out, that they misinterpreted the message -- which was that if the synthetic life were in threat of being annihilated, then they would come and raze all organic life, so the fact that the Romulans were being racist pricks was the actual problem, not the existence of the synths)
… so, Romulans were running the show.
In theory, we already knew this: Commodore Oh is a Romulan agent, and we are shown that she is in a position of power within Starfleet Security in 2385. In fact, given how quickly the Synth Ban is overturned in-universe, I think Chabon wanted to leave us with the general impression that Romulan/Zhat Vash influence was both pervasive and the driving force behind the Ban; once removed (by way of Oh's exposure), the Federation seems to quickly revert to its "good" "uncompromised" self.
Now, I think that's an overly simplistic depiction of institutional prejudice and societal change, and I think it undercuts the attempts PIC S1 made to question the moral purity of, well, everyone: Picard as a person, Starfleet as an organization, the Federation as a society. The handwave of "...and it was all the Romulans' fault!", in my opinion, lets everyone off too easily.
But I definitely believe that the textual intent was to indicate significant Romulan influence over Federation policy in the 2380s and 90s, and I think the backstory from PRO and LDS creates additional complexity and therefore additional opportunity to weave a more nuanced portrait of Romulan involvement.
2383 (speculative): Construction of the Romulan Rescue armada at Utopia Planitia is underway.
This is likely earlier, since the Mars attack resulted in the loss of a portion of the rescue armada (if not all of it), and the Federation deciding that it was not worth the price of another new fleet is what triggered Picard’s resignation.
The Synth ban might be intentionally bidirectional. Because of the risk of a set of potentially-sapient artificial constructs going rogue again, the ban might have been to protect them by preventing their creation.
From their perspective, The Federation has experienced at least 4 different instances of artificial constructs inadvertently becoming sapient:
- Wesley’s Medical Nanite civilisation
- ExoComps
- Holograms
- Android-derived Mars Worker Units(?)
With the synths having the potentially extra boost of being reverse-engineered from Soong-type Androids, which were sapient in their own right.
The ban tries to prevent the issue “Measure of a Man” brings up, where the Federation being able to replicate a sapient artificial construct means that they inadvertently create a slave army, and while Picard later shows that the Mars attack was caused by an outside party, at the time, the Federatio would be entirely justified in seeing the attack as a slave revolt, for their usage of what was a sapient android design, used exclusively for mundane tasks, against the warnings, and desires of Maddox, the person who had the design.
In a lot of those instances you mention, the AI is either alien in nature (the living construct), or an inadvertent/accidental creation (Badgey), which the Synth ban wouldn’t help with. Instead, from what we see, the ban is instead seemingly targeted at humanoid synths, rather than any and all AI creations. It prevents the creation of new positronic matrices, but holodecks, and custom-programmable holograms are still allowed on Federation ships, and we know that Badgey arose from one of those when the safeties were switched off.
The Exocomps were built with off-the-shelf parts, and it is only a custom self-learning algorithm that allowed them to develop sapience, and the nanite civilisation similarly developed from off-the-shelf medical nanites accidentally left to evolve. The Synth ban would not cover these, nor would it cover the ship’s computer, both of which appear to be paths to rogue AI.
As a topic for a separate post, but the more I look at the pre-2385 vs post-2385 stories, the more stark a shift I see, and the more potential for potent storytelling becomes apparent. The Attack on Mars and the Romulan Supernova became a generation-defining event: the 9/11 of its time, separating the 90s-esque optimism of TNG, LDS, and PRO, from the 2000s-2010s-esque troubled times of the Synth Ban and PIC.
I’m not sure that they were all that troubled. The Romulan event and Mars attack did strain the Federation some, but from what we see, Starfleet doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it, or the fallout (we don’t see any Exocomps, so synths may have been affected worse than the show demonstrate). There is no major crisis or anything quite like that, as far as we see, and the parts that we follow appear trouble because we’re following the outskirts, instead of Starfleet itself. We’re on the side of the civilians in the weekly episodes, that have to contend with all kinds of issues before the Enterprise arrives and solves everything.
I really like this analysis!
2383 (speculative): Construction of the Romulan Rescue armada at Utopia Planitia is underway.
This is likely earlier, since the Mars attack resulted in the loss of a portion of the rescue armada (if not all of it), and the Federation deciding that it was not worth the price of another new fleet is what triggered Picard’s resignation.
Yes, I agree -- I'm not entirely sure when the fleet construction would have begun, so that's why I was somewhat vague here and just said "construction is underway". My point is that, regardless of when it began, construction must have been in full swing by '83. I suspect construction actually began in '82, and it can't have been earlier than '81 since that's when Picard was promoted (I think) and he was the one who came up with the idea.
The Synth ban might be intentionally bidirectional. Because of the risk of a set of potentially-sapient artificial constructs going rogue again, the ban might have been to protect them by preventing their creation.
Yeah, this is a really interesting point. Perhaps the Federation believe it was possible that the synths went rogue because they gained sentience inadvertently (despite, I'm sure, Maddox's assurances to the contrary). Honestly, that makes for the most compelling argument in favor of the Synth Ban that I've seen: while I don't agree with it, the idea of preventing the creation of synthetic lifeforms because we can't be sure when/whether they'll become sentient at least has some air of "responsible creation of life" to it. (Vaguely akin to "Don't have a child if you aren't able to take care of it.")
I’m not sure that [the 2390s] were all that troubled.
This is a fair point. I'm basing my assertion here on a "between the lines" reading of PIC S1, where there is a consistent theme of "Starfleet no longer being Starfleet". To your point, the vibe I get isn't that there were lots of crises in the 2390s, but rather that it was a decade of Starfleet not living up to its ideals, having lost its way, etc etc. But I agree that this is implicit in the text rather than explicit.
despite Maddox's assurances to the contrary
I wonder if they were actually to the contrary. At that point in time Maddox had devoted his work to understanding Data's construction and building a sapient Android, in the Noonien-Soong tradition.
He was incensed that Starfleet had him build what was effectively a worker Android, with their intelligence pared down, and it seems entirely within character for him at the time to warn about the possibility of then being designed for sapience, and therefore likely to develop it anyway.
I'm sure the writers understood that synth/ AI would conceivably mean more than just Soong-like Androids and would include holograms as well as other advanced programs which possessed sapience or from which sapience could emerge, but it is another weakness in PIC's storytelling that it feels like the show doesn't understand that these entities are similar and would have been included in the ban.
A few lines of dialogue addressing other kinds of AI would have been satisfying in terms continuity, and would have also emphasized how unjust the ban was. Even tech-augmented individuals may have been unfairly impacted (poor Rutherford!), and while the show does show how former Borg are treated poorly, this is strangely not linked to the synth ban in any meaningful way.
Soong Androids and The Borg are used to explore the the concept of technological singularity (or at least early iterations en route).The (real) fear of the convergence of technology and society/ biology is leveraged as a metaphor for prejudice in TNG. PIC continues those threads... but does not connect them. Like, guys, this is a show about Picard and Data - TNG: Descent and Star Trek: First Contact are right there.