While discussing cyber vulnerabilities in Star Wars, Jon Jeckell explains the limited role of droids:
Perhaps the marginal role and oddly circumscribed capabilities of computers and droids in Star Wars indicates past, even multiple past tragedies with artificially intelligent systems.
There’s evidence of this with killer robot and bounty hunter IG-88, allegedly a leftover from a smoldering droid/AI uprising. Although droids are capable of complex reasoning, tasks, and even emotion, their capabilities seem strangely circumscribed in many ways. R2D2 and C3PO are capable of fully autonomous action, complex reasoning and performing wide ranges of tasks, including many they were never designed to perform. Yet the first generation of Battle Droids fielded by the Separatists were kept under tight central control. They completely shut down in the middle of battle after Anakin Skywalker destroyed the central control ship. Later generations of Separatist war droids operated independently, but demonstrated severely constrained levels of intelligence compared with even the childlike intelligence of R2D2 and C3PO.
There is also a palpable disdain and distrust for droids, particularly in the aftermath of the Clone Wars. Written records cryptically mention that it is standard practice to wipe droid memory regularly. We know this only because Luke Skywalker insisted on making R2D2 an exception from this practice. This may also explain the ancillary role computers are given in operating ships and reveal why ships and fighters have such abysmally poor weapons targeting despite the power of computers and sensors.
There are two ways to get nerdy with things like this. My way is to complain that things don’t seem realistic, or that the authors haven’t taken the underlying premises or technologies in their world ‘seriously’. Jeckell’s is to be a lawyer for the author and try to retcon some nonsense into a plausibly coherent grand narrative.
Quasi-related, I invented a fun past-time game which I call “Smartphone Seinfeld”. Go through every Seinfeld episode and try to imagine it if the characters had smartphones. My claim is that at least 90% of the humor and drama immediately disappears and is resolved.
A lot of what is funny in life are people trying to overcome their little challenges and limitations, but smartphones and apps are trying to overcome all those obstacles.
My thesis, therefore, is that life is about to get a whole lot less funny, all things considered.
I have the same reaction, Handle, but I really enjoy a good explanation for why an inconsistency really makes sense.
Good communication kills sitcoms. It also kills many adventure stories, since they can just call in the cavalry.
A good story would have excellent communications, and everything goes wrong anyway.
Frank Herbert fans would point out that this concern was to be found earlier, in his 1965 novel Dune:
‘Jihad, Butlerian: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”‘