I just got through watching Star Wars: Solo where a droid kinda has a thing for droid self determination (will leave it at that so no spoilers).
While the movie Solo brought it back to mind it has been a question lurking in my head since the 70’s.
Exactly how self aware/sentient are the robot in Star Wars?
Certainly there is a continuum from dumb robots to smarter ones. And certainly we see the biological characters care for some of the robots’ well being (e.g. worried about R2D2 when he gets shot in Star Wars).
Then again the biologics blast robots with seeming abandon giving it as much though as shooting your toaster.
We see robots with “restraining bolts” which suggests they have free will that needs to be curbed (and smacks of slavery).
Yes. They are. But they’re created to be slaves, not be equals or “people”. Thus the level of bigotry toward them, which also occurs against various non-human races.
Hell, the Geonosans weren’t even considered sentient by some in the Republic. In Star Wars Rebels, Captain Rex calls them clever bugs but clearly doesn’t think of them as people.
Maybe not Canon but in some of the novels its suggested that droids that haven’t had their memories wiped for years start to develop a personality and sentience. If you then wipe their memory they basically go back to being the equivalent of an appliance like a toaster or something.
I’ve had the same question for 40 years. It’s one of those uncomfortable things about Star Wars. If the droids are sentient, then they are in a state of slavery.
Until Rogue One and now Solo, with K-2SO and L3-37 being presented as having a more considered and vibrant personality with independent opinions, I thought of the droids as being tools with complex AI and interactivity. Now I’m not so sure, and if there’s anything about these new movies that I don’t like, it’s this, for the reasons mentioned already. Sure, c-3PO seemed to be fairly well rounded as a personality, but he also was comfortable in his area of expertise (negotiation politics and translation), and extremely out of his depth when it came to the subtleties of human interaction. That sounds like a machine’s limitations to me, like expecting a hammer to be good at screwdriving.
The droid torture scene in Return of the Jedi* was what finally cemented it for me - most droids are somewhat sentient, not just the never-wiped R2D2s of the world. Their degree of sentience can vary - I don’t think the mouse droids are likely to be, but most of the ones we see? Sure.
*ETA - realised I now have to be more specific than just “Jedi”, damnit
As a child I had a lot of those book and record sets, many of which were Star Wars ones. One was set in a planet that was run by Droids that had over thrown their owners to be free. That says self aware to me.
If we assume that their programming or hormone system or whatever makes them seek out and find the greatest joy in servitude, then you would have to conclude that we are also slaves since we have built-in impulses to obey our parents, make babies, clump together in social groups, and do other things that aren’t purely rational decisions.
But consider the Battle Droids from the prequels/Clone Wars. If there was any droid that should be programmed to just be a tool, it’s the battle droids, since the expectation is that thousands of them will be destroyed as a matter of course.
And yet, what do we see? Battle droids that do things like flinch away from near-misses and explosions, who gripe about their lot in life just like any other soldier does, and who make snarky asides about their officer’s mistakes.
Why would you program any of that into a tool? The only way their behavior makes sense is if they’re self-aware, but somehow constrained to obey, even when they know they’re getting the short end of the stick.
Some are absolutely as self aware as humans. That is really clear from the get go; C3PO and R2D2 are the first major characters we meet and are clearly meant to be people, not props.
Perhaps others are not as self aware, like battle droids (but then Stormtroopers are people and are slaughtered with the same abandon, so who knows?)
Yes, they’re mostly slaves, but slavery is a major feature of the Star Wars galaxy. The galaxy they live in frankly really sucks. It’s rarely in a state of peace, and when it is, just barely. Crime is rampant, the division between rich and poor is as wide as the galaxy itself, and it’s incessantly violent, heavily armed, industrial, and ugly. It’s no utopia.
People talk to their cars and toasters and treat them like living beings with opinions and personalities. Stands to reason that we’d do it more so with human-like droids regardless of their actual sentience. We love to anthromorphize things.
This isn’t to say that the droids in SW aren’t sentient but “People treat them like living things” probably isn’t good evidence of it.
Why does R2-D2 only talk in beeps? Why are some humanoid and some boxes on wheels? They evolved technologically into being more interactive and self-sufficient, but that doesn’t mean they have to be socially conscious or have a sense of humour.
Chopper (C1-10P) is Hera’s droid in Star Wars Rebels, pulled from the wreckage of a Y-wing that crashed inside the walls of her ancestral home during the clone wars. He’s definitely sentient, self aware and often very human in his reactions.
AP-5 is a droid rescued from an Imperial ship by Chopper, who is definitely sentient and clearly influenced (down to the voice) by Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I’m honestly not sure if you’re agreeing with me, or not.
“but that doesn’t mean they have to be socially conscious or have a sense of humour.”
But my point is, that do have social consciousness, and senses of humour. They were designed at some point, to do a particular job, which explains the R2-D2 issues, but they also (for some reason) have a sense of self that actually isn’t necessary for that job, in a lot of cases.
It’s tempting to say that they develop these features over time, unless their memory is wiped, but that doesn’t explain the Battle Droids. We see them being built, so they’re fairly new, and we know they have a high mortality rate, so how would so many of them have had enough time to develop their own personalities? And why are their personalities so uniform from one set of battle droids to the next?
I’m not agreeing with you. I can see that these new movies are portraying the droids as much more sophisticated personalities than before, but I don’t like that development, it doesn’t feel properly Star Wars to me now that they’ve done that.
I know C-3PO was relatively sophisticated, but he seemed to have a specialised area and kept to that, and was happy to do so. Discontent or cynicism, like K-2SO or L3-37 have displayed, seems far away from his abilities.
