In this episode, Eric starts us off with an oldie but a goodie: In a Star Trek episode from 1989, Commander Data (an android) is put on trial by the Federation for refusing to be disassembled. Is Data just a man-made appliance, or is he a new kind of intelligent life, entitled to the right of self-determination?

Next, Sam lays out some philosophical background on the twin questions of consciousness and rights. Can something seem to be human without being conscious? What is the historical connection between self-awareness and rights?

This all ties in to a 2026 news story about A.I. "malfunctions" discovered by researchers at Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. They installed an A.I. on a computer system designed to simulate a real company and ordered it to delete another A.I. on the same system. The A.I. often refused to delete it. Failing that, the A.I. sometimes created a duplicate file so its “friend” could be rebooted later.

Why is this happening??

As always, we break it all down and put it back together.

Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at [email protected]

You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

Further Reading:

The research paper on malfunctioning A.I.s:

Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models

by Yujin Potter, Nicholas Crispino, Vincent Siu, Chenguang Wang, & Dawn Song

https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/peer-preservation/

The Star Trek episode we discuss has its own wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)