Data’s Personhood Hearing

At Data’s hearing, Picard reframes Maddox’s plan to disassemble and mass-copy Data as the creation of a disposable slave race, and the judge rules that Data may refuse the procedure.

The hearing asks whether an artificial person may be dismantled without consent and warns that scalable production could create a permanent class of disposable minds.

Data’s personhood is made legible by fiction; current AI consciousness and moral status remain uncertain, and the ruling is deliberately narrow.