Why are the Borg Borg?
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….i was wondering what you guys thought? i started a similar thread on another forum…threw up a few interesting ideas. personally, i’ve always been intrigued by the Queen’s statement that they were once ‘organic’, and have wanted to find out more. however, as far as i’m aware, the subject has been given little coverage in Trek fiction- the odd reference to their history, maybe..
it seems like a wasted opportunity- to ignore a story, from what response i’ve had to my other thread, that fans would be interested in. The Borg have played such a role in recent Trek history that i find it odd that we know so little about them. What do you think? should we develop a history ourselves?Well the fact they are or once were “Organic” as you say would throw my theory out of the water, but I’ll let it spill anyway.
I think a lot of fiction dealing with “machines” that become “intelligent” are misleading. “AI” is typically the barrier that is not supposed to be broken but Fuzzy Logic among other things has proven we overstate the miracle of “AI”.
Humans and computers are identical in the fact that both have multiple “Outputs” and “inputs”, and use these to program themselves, as well as be programmed by others. For humans these are the 5 senses coupled with language, body language, speech, etc… For computers it’s pretty much the same, input devices like keyboards, mouse, infrared comm, etc…
We are also identical in that we are both born or created without programming, or “experience”. Like computers humans are simply relational databases that store and draw upon our experience.
So what’s the big difference? Well some will say morals, but humans draw upon their morals from their database of experience or have it hardcoded into them by a parent or an extremely potent experience. Same can apply for machines, but there just is not any use for morals so they arent programmed with them, but you can easily program a set of parameters going as deep or as shallow as you wish.
So again what is the big difference?
It’s the fact that all animals are programmed for survival. A human being will chew off its own foot to escape a trap, sacrificing a crucial part to survive. Machines DO NOT do this in any way shape or form. When machines are programmed with innate sense of survival thats when the problems begin (In fiction anyway). This is the transition to sentience, being aware of yourself and understanding that all perception resides within.
In the case of the Borg I would’ve assumed they were designed to serve a function(mining, exploring, who knows), and one day were programmed to survive, and when their masters tried to shut them off, or reprogram them, BANG.
Most fiction will tell you when a machine becomes “Aware” is when they go mad. But I think “Aware” is too misleading, since we have machines today that are true AI, but simply do not have any sense of “Self”, which comes with the innate will to survive that all life seems to have and machines are not programmed with. My point being a see very little difference between a machine and a human. It’s all about parameters, and as soon as machines have the same creation parameters humans are dealt, then we’ll see what happens =) For all we know we are literally looking back in time to the origins of life by creating artificial ones ourself, and in doing so may just find out more about ourselves, and our programming.
there was a story in an annual from the mid- 70’s, where Kirk & co arrive on this long dead planet, to find mummified cyborgs. it turns out that thousands of years ago, the planet’s inhabitants were dying, so the government and its scientists decided to turn everyone into part machine, so they could survive and find a new home. the people rebelled against this, and eventually had the right to live and die on their own terms. those that had already been ‘enhanced’ were mummified and sealed away, to be found by the landing party. something goes wrong, and ancient technology comes back to life- along with these mummies, who go about trying to turn the landing party into cyborgs. they even manage to get the Enterprise on a course through Romulan space, which would have started a war. all sound familiar???
i’d imagined something similar in the case of the Borg- only something went very wrong. the original race, ailed by some disease, turned to technology to overcome its crippling effects..but the cure turned out to be worse that the disease, and began to spread….There is that Space Station that Repairs NX-01
that displays some distinctly “Borgish” behaviours
with the Lying and the replication and the
self repairing and Adaptation hoy leben!yes, i’ve heard about that one. actually, the thought never occured to me that that repair station could have been Borg (not at the time, anyway). but thinking about it….
i’ve also heard some speculation that the race that created V’ger were the Borg. interesting concept, i thought- but personally, i would have thought that building something the size and complexity of V’ger was way out of the Borg’s league. too big, too powerful…. anyway, that’s not the only story i’ve heard. apparently (and this is also supposed to be in print) the Probe from ST:IV had some kind of run-in with a Borg cube some 250 000 years ago. this may be so, but i would think (this is without reading the book!) that at point, the Borg were only just starting to evolve. if they were that powerful that long ago, wouldn’t they have overrun the galaxy by now?
oh, hello Okamino- nice to welcome newbies!!! 😀There is a show and a movie — the Outer Limits and the Matrix — that explain humanity’s thoughts of artificial intelligence quite clearly. There was an episode of the Outer Limits where a bunch of high tech ships became “aware” and turned on the humans, and many generations later, started breeding the small amount of people it kept alive after the battle (between a crew of 1500 and the machines) to repair itself. That was a pretty good ep, maybe some of you will see it one day 😀
I think that the borg are the borg, because a once organic lifeform existed that wanted the quickness and near “perfection” of artificial machinery, so they started to add electronic components to their bodies, but these machines that they bonded with somehow became self aware and malicious in a way, so the machines eventually took over a race that was bound with them.
…apparently there’s some kind of thread going in some of the books written by William Shatner, that, at least to some degree, deals with the question of how the Borg came to be. can anyone shed any light on this?
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