Yesterday, the world lost one of its great thespians. Sir Patrick Stewart, known on stage for his riveting portrayals of Shakespeare’s characters and, more broadly, for his film portrayals of the X-Men’s Professor X, passed away after a short battle with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

But of course, the role Stewart is best known for is playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran for seven seasons from 1987 to 1994.

Unlike other sci-fi of the time, particularly the more popular Star Wars, Star Trek: The Next Generation often explored the philosophical and social aspects of technology, with many of its most memorable episodes addressing the moral implications of scientific progress.

One particular episode, “The Measure of a Man,” from 1989, saw Stewart’s Picard make an impassioned plea and legal argument that his friend, the artificially intelligent android Data, played by Brent Spiner, should not be considered Starfleet property but a sentient being with the associated rights all individual sentient beings have.

This, of course, was decades before artificial intelligence went from being science fiction to science fact in our 21st-century world. But it’s not the only time Stewart contemplated the technology and its moral implications.

In 2014, Stewart gave an interview to Smithsonian magazine in which he, perhaps the most popular science fiction captain ever, was asked his opinion on the then-burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, and whether any future AI beings should have the same rights as humans.

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