Droids, sentience and natural rights

"Well, if droids could think, none of us would be here..."

It's quite clear that droids have varying degrees of sentience and sapience. It's also clear that, over time, without memory wipes, programming develops into personality and we get actual persons at some level. It's quite clear that R2-D2 and C-3P0 are persons, not merely machines, and Whistler is in the same category. We've seen others likewise move that direction, from IG-88 to I-5.

So, since droids are clearly capable of developing sentience, how do they fit into the picture of natural rights for sapient and sentient beings?

More, are things like memory wipes wrong? It seems to me they certainly are after the development of such a personality, but is a pre-development memory wipe wrong? Is it on par with abortion, and thus a topic that would see considerable debate? For that matter, is it wrong to do memory wipes on droids like I-5?

And why does the galaxy continue to refuse to grant rights to droids?

 

Well, if droids had rights, there'd be no point in making them -- the point of a droid is having an obedient slave incapable of independent thought. There's enough sentient beings teeming through the galaxy demanding rights and privileges without intentionally creating still more of them. This is the great irony of any droids' rights movement -- the most obvious result of granting droids rights would be a drastic decline in the number of droids being produced.

 

Because it's more convenient not to.

 

I think the memory wipe/personality debate got a lot more interesting after Threepio got one in RotS - with no noticeable change in demeanor. It could be that personality quirks develop in droids independently of their standard memory. That would make a memory wipe less a matter of "aborting" a sentient being's "humanity", and more akin to forcibly giving someone amnesia. Which is, of course, a moral debate all to itself, but a different one from something closer to abortion or euthanasia. And as for whether it should be accepted in the GFFA, we've already seen the Republic be perfectly fine with slave armies, and with, as I've harped on recently, a lack of representation for a great deal of its member species, so something tells me the droid Civil Rights movement is a long way off.

A droid revolution is, to me, the Greatest Yet-Unexplored Major Event in SW history.

 

Forcibly "uplifting" species like the Ewoks to galactic-level technology so they can have a seat in the Senate would be almost as arbitrary and cruel as denying nonsentient droids memory wipes so they can develop sentience so they can be "full citizens".

Sentience and knowledge are a burden as much as they are a gift. There are enough informed galactic citizens running around being unhappy without swelling their ranks enormously due to misguided idealism.

Poor "Therefore I Am". Everyone only brings it up to talk about how it doesn't count.

 

I think this goes down to what your definition of the use of a droid is. Aren't most droids for data storage, interpretation, and piloting? A droid then is in possession of a lot of information that could be dangerous if gotten into the wrong hands. Can a droid self-wipe? If a droid could have a program that hid away information (some do, cuz Whister did and so did R2) then I'd say wipes are unnecessary because you would just store the highly sensitive information in those areas with specific keys to get them out.

 

Droid slavery is the great unspoken crime of SW. And I am 100% serious.

Before I begin, I would like you to remember that one of my favorite franchises is Transformers, and two of my favorite episodes of Star Trek are 'Measure of a Man' and 'The Offpsing'.

NHot all droids are sentient, but for those that do exhibit those characteristics of sentience... it is a crime and an indecency. Han's treatment of Threepio os appalling. Memory wipes make me cringe.

Droids are inorganic, mere machines? So are we, bio-chemical rather than electro-mechanical. No souls? Says who? And how can you prove they don't? How can you prove you yourself have a soul? Where's your spark?

Droids are made of metal and plastic? I have iron in my blood, calcium in my bones and magnesium doing... stuff.

They are programmed? So am I.

Droid slavery is wrong. It is the true abomination of the GFFA.

It is not what you're made of, but who you are.

 

Blasted droids, stealing all our jobs.



On a less sarcastic note, is it possible for a droid to connect to the Force? Not counting Iron Knights, because I thought they had some critter living inside them that did that, but just a straight up R2 unit--Skippy style--connecting to the Force. Didn't Yoda say in ESB that the Force extended even to Luke's ship, which is decidedly non-sentient---or even to a rock? Maybe a Droid should get so ticked off at the rights of his people getting trampled on that he gives into the Dark Side and we get a nine book hardcover series out of the deal.

Darth Droid.

Yeah, I'm not really kidding either. A Major Droid Revolution TM would be pretty awesome, and could open up some real longlasting effects in the GFFA...though someone will have to notify the cast of Legacy that they're all a bunch of bigots...not that they'd probably care.

 

When a droid is built does it have a soul the moment it's "turned on"? Or does it take time to develop that personality and traits that give it a soul? In NJO 3P0 was clearly scared for his life in many different scenes. I wish we had more people say what R2 is really saying, not just beep beep tweet toop. This is an interesting topic, and I agree that a major droid revolution would be a great story.

 

In one of the Tales of the Bounty Hunters stories, Zuckus' droid partner (4-LOM?) tried to connect with the Force and, apperantly succeeded (at one point he tries to meditate to discover the location of the Rebel fleet so they can get to Solo; he "forsees" that they will be outside the Galactic plane, which he discounts as illogical, but later finds out was true).

As for droids' rights, as another poster mentioned, the inevitable result would be the cessation of droid production. Unless the droids started building more themselves, which couldn't possibly end well. And, besides, does it really matter that they are sentient? They were quite literally created to serve, and giving them rights would just add another faction to an already fractious galaxy.

 

I totally agree. And this is a rich story area even if it does veer away from the fantasy aspect and gets into all sorts of philosophical problems.

I wouldn't mind a droid revolution arc somewhere. In some small corner of the galaxy.

Reeves got into Feral Droids in Jedi Twilight. That was weird.

 

The Force. It's convenient like that.

Seriously, though, the vast majority of droids we actually *see* aren't all that sentient at all -- most of them don't even act particularly human, and the ones that do do so in a very rudimentary way that would barely pass a Turing test. C-3PO and R2-D2 are clearly highly anomalous in this regard.

(And yes, I know there are glaring exceptions that don't make any sense one way or the other, like the slapstick comments the battle droids make to each other in Clone Wars Animated. I chalk this up to dumbness for no purpose but comic relief.)

 

Well there M4-78, but it would be interesting to see some sort of droid revolution, this is one thing that would have added to the NJO.

However, robot war is so campy Sci-fi that it would take a good writer for it to work.

 

I think it's interesting that all droid revolutions seen so far have been depicted as bad things. Man vs. his mechanical creations is a pretty common sci-fi theme, but this being a franchise that was introduced with a pair of droids, it's odd and rather disappointing that that trope has never been broken away from. I'd really like to see a sympathetic droid revolution.

 

I think Stackpole could do this well, given his BattleTech books.

 

Uh, Battletech doesn't have any robots in it, just people in mechanical suits.

On-topic, I always thought G0-T0 was an interesting twist on the "evil robots go Frankenstein" trope, and one of the annoying things about KotOR 2 was the way they let that plotline just drop. Droids trying to save humans from themselves in a way makes more sense and is more compelling than the tired old "droids = slaves" rebellion storyline. (For one thing, I continue to advocate for that being the *real* story behind the Matrix -- the robots put humanity in a bottle because that's the logical consequence of the Three Laws of Robotics, up to and including making up a totally fake story about a war against evil machines in order to make the few freed humans feel better about their situation.)

 

I still think Stackpole could do it though

 

Seriously, though, the vast majority of droids we actually *see* aren't all that sentient at all -- most of them don't even act particularly human, and the ones that do do so in a very rudimentary way that would barely pass a Turing test. C-3PO and R2-D2 are clearly highly anomalous in this regard.


Good point; most droids are about as human-esque as a Dell laptop.


As for 3PO's seemingly emotional reactions during the NJO and at various dangerous time beforehand, I'm not really entirely sure how to classify them. Most of the time they seem more concerned with self-preservation than anything else; self-preservation is an aspect of all forms of life, not just ones traditionally identified as sapient. Now, if 3PO acted for reasons that had nothing to do with his own preservation and served solely to benefit others beyond his programming as a protocol droid, I'd consider the case of droids like him being sapient to be pretty rock-solid. But, as far as I know, he's only shown leanings in that direction once, in TESB-"Oh no! Stormtroopers! I must warn the others!"-and that was after his initial self-preservation reaction.

Another good example of 3PO's basic non-humanity are his reactions in ROTS during Order 66. He's obviously aware that Padme isn't doing too well emotionally, and offers a bit of sympathy that sounds about as genuine as a Hallmark card. After that, he just leaves; there's none of the unsure "should I do something else?" that humans would probably exhibit by hanging around awkwardly.

Another problem with assigning sapience to droids like 3PO is that he, and all of his kind, were initially built in a factory, with specific programming. To borrow a Terminator term, his chip is set to read-only, not read-write.

 

Given that the real challenge in a "droid revolution" series would, IMO, not be the military adventure stuff -- which we have oodles of in Star Wars anyway and which wouldn't be that different from what's par for the course in SW EU books -- but characterizing the droid rebels in a way that makes sense and tugs at the heartstring without seeming like a campy rehash of all the stupid stereotypes of "robots gone mad" or "poor oppressed robots" we've seen ten zillion times before, I do think Stackpole's lack of published experience addressing issues like AI and robots matters.

 

Another one is Guri, but more like after her memory wipe.

 

I disagree that droid sentience is an anomaly. Just in the movies we have TC-14 (and by extension other protocol droids) and the waitress droid in Dex's, just for a start.

Also ponder this:

In the movies, we get more conversations between droids in the CIS armies than we get between clones in the Republic armies.

Compares the battle droids and R2-D2 at the beginning of ROTS, for instance. If that's not human behaviour, I don't know what is.

 

Droids should not be granted rights because it would be the equivalent of granting rights to my laptop. It only takes what I put into it, reacting accordingly to what I tell it. No independent or creative thought. And the vast majority of droids have even less sentient properties than a vacuum cleaner.

 

Being able to briefly hold a conversation is not the same thing as "sentience". TC-14 is a protocol droid -- her job is to carry out polite conversations according to strict, predictable, programmable patterns (which is what "protocol" means). We have no evidence that she can do anything besides conduct a proper official conversation and emit signs of alarm and distress when threatened by open violence. It wouldn't be that hard to program a computer to do the same today. (Well, okay, it'd be difficult, but nowhere along the lines of creating a *sentient being*.)

Which makes sense, because true personal sentience is *exactly what you don't want* in a "protocol droid", whose job is, after all, to hold no opinions of its own whatsoever but be a perfect diplomatic conduit for other people's communications. C-3PO's own personal sentience is repeatedly shown to *hinder* his ability to act as a perfect translator.

If you consider him to be truly "sentient" at all in his incarnation in the Prequel Trilogy, which I would say is doubtful -- scratch beneath the surface of his "comic relief" hijinks and from an IU perspective it's clear that he has a very limited understanding of what's going on around him and his reactions seem to be limited to very simple surprise and fear, almost like Anakin programmed him to be a cartoon character to spout cute one-liners for his mother's amusements (which is, in fact, exactly what he did). I agree that the C-3PO we're shown in the OT is clearly meant to be a person with thoughts and ideas of his own, but I see no evidence for this in the hollow shell of 3PO we're presented in the PT.

 

It would be an interesting way to take the EU into high SF, exploring the idea of sentience. Are we just arrogant?

 

I don't see much difference between the trilogies when it comes to 3PO's behavior.