"Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability. It's so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can't reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is.
I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it, but I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."
What he's talking (imo) about is how the images produced by the technology aren't art, because they don't comprehend the human pain that would inspire true art. They're just creepy stuff
Data is the ND character. Star Trek, and sci-fi and fantasy in general, use characters that are visibly others, to represent diverse human experiences. Check out season 1 episode 16 of the Original Series, the Galileo Seven, in which Spock is in command of an away mission that crashes on a planet's surface, and his Vulcan logic is tested, dealing with the emotions of his crew. To me, it was clearly a portrayal of neurodivergence.
Spock is literally neurodivergent. His genes are hybrid, human and Vulcan, and so, therefore, is his brain. Data and his positronic brain fill that same role in the Next Generation.
Boimler gets associated with the ND characters in the show too, like Data and Spock. The crew of the Carlsbad expected him to be a hovering cube. I think it's definitely intentional
It's clear you don't have the necessary context to understand the plot. Data's character arc spans the entire show. The emotion chip is experimental, and something his original creator specifically didn't install at the time of his creation, because it wasn't ready. There's a prototype of Data as well, called Lore, who does have emotions, but become a violent psychopath. They can't just "make it work," and doing so would defeat the point of it as a plot device.
Interesting. Wild, but interesting. I consider Mormons to be Christian too, I didn't realize it was its own thing, I thought it was just the blanket term for religions that worship Jesus.
Now we're going to have to go north for medicine and graphics cards