The mobile emitter came from 500 years in the future. Its allowed to be "magic" even by Star Trek standards.
Energy is cheap in an interstellar economy. It kind of has to be, otherwise you are not going to space today. The most restricted and scarce resource in the Star Trek universe appears to be bandwidth.
Why can the Doctor (and information in general) not be effectively backed up? Why are comm pads ferried around the ship by hand instead of using email, remote login, or even teleportation? (Though that could be handwaved as basic military paranoia.) Why can the ship not automatically produce a "man overboard" alert when the number of life-signs unexpectedly drops?
I would expect AI to be cheap in Voyager's time. TNG would make conversational sentient AIs by accident in the holodeck with alarming ease. The Doctor was supposed to be an expert machine, and yet became basically sentient within a year.
Overall it seems that AI is cheap in Star Trek, but the "spark" of sentience is something that could only arise accidentally. However, because the mobile emitter exists, one could presume that holographic workers are pretty common by the 29th century.
Energy is cheap in an interstellar economy. It kind of has to be, otherwise you are not going to space today. The most restricted and scarce resource in the Star Trek universe appears to be bandwidth.
Why can the Doctor (and information in general) not be effectively backed up? Why are comm pads ferried around the ship by hand instead of using email, remote login, or even teleportation? (Though that could be handwaved as basic military paranoia.) Why can the ship not automatically produce a "man overboard" alert when the number of life-signs unexpectedly drops?
I would expect AI to be cheap in Voyager's time. TNG would make conversational sentient AIs by accident in the holodeck with alarming ease. The Doctor was supposed to be an expert machine, and yet became basically sentient within a year.
Overall it seems that AI is cheap in Star Trek, but the "spark" of sentience is something that could only arise accidentally. However, because the mobile emitter exists, one could presume that holographic workers are pretty common by the 29th century.