Saga Is there a reason for the anti-droid racism?

"we don't serve their kind here" - I wish they had've explained the logic behind this mindset -"droids are taking our jobs" for example, or rallies against AI, or some connection with people associating them with the droid troops that killed so many people, etc during the PT era of movies, however it was never explained. Is there a canonical explanation for this? If not, is there at least an EU explanation?

 

Well, I can think of two reasons.

One, droids have to be built by other lifeforms, and are basically the creator's slaves. Yes, some have sentience, but they're generally just used for menial service or engineering work. Thus, the people who use the droids have no reason to give them rights, otherwise they would be useless for the purpose they were created for. If that happened, no one would bother to build droids anymore.

Additionally, the PT does give some justification for a larger scale 'anti droid backlash'. The primary antagonists of the Republic/Empire in the Clone Wars used droids for the majorities of their armies and ships, thus creating a distrust of droids, lest they cause another large scale conflict.

 

Interestingly droids were allowed inside the Cantina according to an early McQuarrie drawing (but so were seeker remotes, looking for criminals they could execute on the spot...).

I'm not aware of an official explanation, so all I can offer is this:

1. The bar doesn't have lubricants or oils for droids and only serves organic customers. It's a small place and droids would just unnecessarily take up space, so they have to wait outside.
2. The patrons prefer privacy to conduct their deals. Droids with special hearing capabilities could be deliberately brought in to listen to these conversations. So they have to wait outside to ensure the patrons' privacy.

 

Droids are not a race, therefore there is no racism involved.

 

I was also thinking that droids can be used as weapons or surveillance devices for the empire, the Hutts, bounty hunters or criminals.

 

Thanks for mentioning this, yes, in the ANH novelization Threepio was really scared that the stormtroopers might just shoot him, erroneously assuming he was a walking bomb. One more reason to keep droids outside the Cantina, they might be walking bombs going for a target but causing a lot of collateral damage.

 

The question of AI and how it's treated in the SW universe has always bothered me. Basically, my attitude now is "Don't think about it too hard." But when I do, it goes something like this...

Even as a kid, one of the first things I really recall striking me about ANH is Threepio saying, "We seem to be made to suffer." Also, throughout the first six movies, Artoo is an incredible hero (not to mention The Clone Wars show too). Without Artoo, our humanoid heroes would have crashed and burned, multiple times. Artoo constantly saves the day -for Padme, for Anakin, for Ahsoka, Obi-Wan and later, Luke, Han and Leia. And although he's appreciated by all his owners, he's seldom rewarded, except in terms of being repaired. (Obi-Wan doesn't even remember him in ANH! Which I know is a glitch that comes about because of the order the films were made in but bothers me nonetheless.)

Threepio's mind is wiped at the end of ROTS too - which seems to me to be horrific for an entity who has done nothing except perform loyal service. Threepio is quite clearly sentient - he thinks, feels and expresses himself, learns, develops, even changes. Okay, he can be annoying, but he certainly doesn't deserve all the terrible things that are done to him.

I guess this is just a society that takes the servitude of these beings for granted. They are second-class beings, no matter how they evolve. Artoo especially should be decorated multiple times over for his heroism and bravery. But he isn't. He also tends to be smarter than paractically every other character. He also is very caring and loyal - especially if your family name happens to be Skywalker.

I can't think of an onscreen reason why droids are treated like this. Perhaps there was one in the EU that I read about years ago, but not one in the movies themselves that I can recall offhand.

 

PS I like the way Poe Dameron treats BB-8 - as a friend. BB-8 is more like a loyal, very smart dog and is treated with genuine care and joy by Poe when they meet again. So maybe things have moved on a little by the time of TFA. I'm hoping we'll see more of these attitudes in Ep. VIII. BB-8 also has a lot more agency than even Artoo did in the original saga...

Han's reaction to Threepio when he meets him is amusingly consistent, however.

 

True. He's seriously upset when Artoo is lost in that explosion at the end of his special mission with D-Squad. You'd think he'd be nicer to him during the Death Star trench run.

Maybe that's why Darth is in such a bad mood all the time? He lost his favorite droid.

 

Skydoll

How should droids b rewarded then? Besides parts, power, lubricants & upgrades? They don't need food, water, luxury living or clothing. Yes there r a few non master owned droids who do their own thing. I think they get treated slightly better.

 

Even though they technically qualify as tools, they still have an artificial intelligence and apparently not only mimic human behaviour but have the capability to develop a personality, While they may not be regarded as "equals" I still think they qualify as partners and should be treated and respected as such, within common sense.

 

I reward my laptop with a hug every time it gets an important email or notification to me. Cortana is lovely.

 

I think OP meant racism as an allegory for ''bigotry''.

 

It's not really a question of how they should be rewarded, but how they're treated in general. Artoo probably gets loads of extra memory every time he rescues Anakin, who understands the value of having a smart droid at your back.

It also always bothered me that Chewie never received a medal for his part in the battle of Yavin, even though he was there co-piloting with Han - an equal part in aiding Luke to blow up the Death Star. (I once read somewhere in the EU that he did get a medal, but he was too tall for Leia to put it around his neck during the ceremony. Nice bit of retcon, if there hadn't been any steps or Chewie couldn't bend.)

But back to droids. It's just a humanoid-centric worldview. But why bother to create droids endowed with AI that are self-aware, sentient, capable of learning - and also suffering? Why not just keep them as non-sentient interactive tools? This is why Bail Organa's treatment of Threepio at the end of ROTS seems incredibly harsh, but it's treated as a joke - even Artoo sounds like he's laughing!

If "memories maketh the man," if they can perceive of their situations and are self-aware, even if programmed to be servants, erasing an individual's memory is tantamout to willfully endowing them with amnesia. What a horrible thing to do to someone, especially in such a casual way. if you did that to someone in the real world, you'd be charged with grievous bodily harm (no pun intended).

Anakin and Luke rely on Artoo on many occasions, and trust him utterly. But they seem to be exceptions rather than the general rule. That just may be because that there isn't much egalitarianism in the SW universe. (And I don't really watch it and love it for that, to be fair.) But most people (humanoids and aliens) seem to treat droids with a faint disdain, or worse. Anakin's attachment to Artoo is often seen as eccentric.

Ultimately, it comes down to a sense of equality. Are droids "alive"? They sure seem to be - Artoo's the biggest argument that they are. And, if they are, don't they have certain rights - or are they, to put it politely, indentured servants simply by virtue of the fact that they're artificial?

I'm not really making a case for any of these points... they're just observations, things that have occurred to me over the years.

Or:

The droids' rights campaign starts here!

 

I know what he meant. My point is that it doesn't apply. It's like questioning racism/bigotry/whatever in a building that doesn't allow cellphones, for example.

Droids are tools, machines, etc. Not living beings or people, no matter how attached some people can be to them.

 

Could be something because of the Clone Wars.

 

Yes, I often feel a sense of intense dislike towards my neighbor's car. I've been trying to get that make of car banned from refueling at the local gas station for years, because the design of them is all wrong, they guzzle the stuff, and also, they smell. Plus the neighbor's one has a really annoying habit of accosting me in a friendly way when I leave the house. Don't even mention the guy's talking power drill.

Wait. Sorry, wrong universe...

This is not the same as anthropomorphism, or of growing attached to or feeling revulsion for an inanimate object onto which you project a persona. If droids were merely tools or machines, the idea that people feel bigotry towards them would be absurd. Yet, in SW, some biological beings clearly do. And if they were just devices, Jabba wouldn't get such a kick out of torturing them.

To all intents and purposes, the only thing that separates Artoo, Threepio and BB-8 from other characters in SW is the fact that they're synthetic and subject to the power of restraining bolts (another point that underscores the idea that they're slaves, along with being bought and sold). They can't manipulate the Force either, but that's no different from the vast majority of organic beings seen in the galaxy.

Sentience comes about somehow, whether they're programed to have it or if it develops over time if they don't get their memory wiped. Artoo seems to have survived for so long because he learns. He reasons and takes risks; he remains loyal to certain individuals, he thinks, feels and forms attachments - so much so that he closes down when Luke vanishes. Any learning intelligence that develops and grows is, by definition, alive, whether its contained in circuits or organic cells.

A lot of SF has expended a lot of time and story exploring the question of whether a machine intelligence can be 'alive' or not and the overwhelming consensus is that it can. It's not just a possibility, it's inevitable for any technological civilization to eventually create AI. It's just that Star Wars tends not to deeply explore the ethics of how it treats its synthetic life forms, which is a shame, as it could be another whole layer to the mythology.

 

People can be intolerant of machines and tools, with or without AI.

What is tortute for a droid? To emit a sound emulating pain after an action is inflicted to them? Droids are machines. They don't feel. Any perceived pain is emulated.

And that they are limited to their programming. And everything else that separates a machine from a living being.

 

I love how this has become a philosophical debate about the ethical, moral and existential implications of the Turing test, AI and power drills. xD

 

If humans can be thought of "biological machines" why can't droids be "mechanical lifeforms"?

 

I think it could come down to the question of sentience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

Here is the Wikipedia definition:

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.
...
In science fiction, an alien, android, robot, hologram, or computer described as "sentient" is usually treated as a fully human character, with similar rights, qualities, and capabilities as any other character. Foremost among these properties is human level intelligence (i.e. "sapience"), but sentient characters also typically display desire, will, consciousness, ethics, personality, insight, humor, ambition and many other human qualities. Sentience is being used in this context to describe an essential human property that brings all these other qualities with it. The words "sapience", "self-awareness", and "consciousness" are used in similar ways in science fiction.

As Bishop said in Aliens: "I prefer the term artificial person"

 

Because there's no life to begin with.

 

To be fair, it would be more of a simulation of life, which would be debatable as to whether or not it could be referred to artificial life, or just the ability to play a role that we perceive to be that of a living being, while all actions are the results of calculations, simulations, input sensory data and learnt behaviour from recorded data in the memory, as opposed to being an actual conscience (though where do we draw the line between the two or truly know when we have crossed it?).

 

Indeed - a bad workman blames his tools. The problem is not with the tools, but with the emotional state of the workman. It still doesn't make a person bigoted against them.

How do you know they don't feel? They may have pain receptors embedded in their metallic skins. Besides, emotional pain is another thing again. If an AI can learn and develop, its perceptions may be different, but it may evolve its own kind of distress. Threepio doesn't want his mind wiped - why does he even express that, or know how to (it isn't simple emulation)? He must have attachment to his sense of self via his memories. These are interesting questions. SW droids are not limited by their programming. They have the capacity to reason, and that's just for starters.

This is a total straw man argument. You're not engaging at all with any of the wider points I or others have made.

Fair point - but Droid programming would have to be incredibly sophisticated to account for such a simulation. Which is why it'd be easier to give an AI the capacity to learn. Artoo learns, and thinks, reasons. He may be alive, as he has grown way beyond his original programming. It depends on how you define life, of course. But any learning intelligence that becomes self-aware, is by most modern definitions, considered to be "alive."