Grrl Power #1490 - Maybe the ship computer is the funny one (Patreon)

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The trying-to-come-up-with-a-page-title me of right now as I'm posting this comic really wishes that writing-the-comic-page-in-the-past me would do better at sticking to a single theme per page. This page goes from explaining the prank from the previous page to computer voice gender preferences to ship AI's of pop-culture to betting to trope-aware arguing. 

You know, the Enterprise-D's computer was just about the perfect kind of advanced computer. It was something resembling an AI, in that it could parse natural speech and extrapolate contextually, (especially when they were talking to it in the holodeck) but it wasn't the sort of computer that was anthropomorphized in any way, and didn't ever seem to have any ambitions of its own. Unless there's an episode I'm not remembering where it went crazy. The closest I can recall was when it created Moriarty, and that was just based on a badly worded request from... Jeordi? It's been a while since I saw it.

Actually, by far the worst kind of computer techno-fear episodes they ever did were all the Holodeck's fault. Every season had an episode where the safety protocols got disengaged and people got trapped. Hey geniuses, maybe make it so the regular holodecks can't have the safeties disengaged under any circumstances. Like the whole thing shuts down if anything goes awry. Have the first thing every single line of code does is check to make sure the squishy meatbags inside can't have their noggins cracked open because the rocks are too hard or whatever. Like how post-Otis elevators can't fall if the cable breaks, because the weight of the carriage pulling on the cable is what holds the emergency brakes open. If the cable snaps, the spring-loaded brake returns to its original shape, jutting out past the carriage to catch on the rails. 

So then I guess maybe you'd want a smaller holodeck that can only be used by the redshirts... er... I guess they were gold in TNG. They shouldn't have muddied those waters by making an unnecessary change. But I suppose that could have happened because the "main" actors didn't want to do a lot of close up shots with their yellow shirt reflecting on their chins, making them look jaundice? Pure speculation on my part. It was probably totally arbitrary. Anyway, at least in that security focused holodeck, you could be reasonably sure that random crew members >cough<Barclay>cough< weren't side loading custom mods or rootkits or whatever.