StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Crosspost from reddit /mawinstallation...

...instead of a centralized giant AI core they have a "cloud" thing where while they have individual minds capable of individual decisions (instead of the old slave-brained B1s) though even then they are not individually THAT smart... but they are also wirelessly interconnected and form some aggregate intelligence for collective decision making AND they have select commander-node droids? Perhaps the interconnection isn't a constant stream but done via periodic check-ins (they literally silently beam each other information and go ROGER ROGER)... if you go all METAL GEAR and sneak around and shoot one droid, will all the other droids know?
Heck, the periodic pulses/bursts of wireless information could be preferred over a constant stream in order to... minimize chances of Republic signal-interception/detection/surveillance/hacking/jamming? Hence the droids also do verbal communications and roger-roger in front of each other (if you think about it, robots don't really need to talk to each other... but if two droids wirelessly communicate with each other and this gets picked up by some orbiting ELINT-optimized Venator that proceeds to target the area with its turbolasers... then it makes sense to use verbal communications at close range...).

The hybrid periodic wireless transmissions + delegated command units + masses of individual independent but not-that-smart grunts would, IMO, actually resemble the processes involved in... real meatbag army ranks, hierarchies and communications. Or at least be closer to that than, say, a horde of slave-bots being puppetmastered by some AI core in some orbiting donut-ship like in TPM. So depending on whether or not hordes of pseudo-autonomous droids were used in galactic-scale warfare beforehand in SW history... maybe the CIS was actually making leaps and strides in terms of technological and droid-intelligence scientific progress during the Clone Wars.

That first paragraph sounds more like how the borg would work. Sans the ROGER ROGER at some point.

It does seem to match what we see on screen. I'm not sure they would be putting that much R&D into droid brains during the war though. You don't want your army suddenly acquiring the ability to think for itself in the middle of a campaign after all

Then again they made a Kalani... and you want them to murder Republic military hordes and ARC spec-ops units and Jedi and such.

Do you want Geth? Because that's basically how Geth work.

Not to mention that this was the reason the geth rebelled in the first place. In Mass Effect 3, EDI notes it is likely that the quarians' historical accident was not making the geth enough like them. The problem is that their networked intelligence prevented them from valuing individuals in the same way a person would. EDI herself was designed to have individual preferences that cause her to value others in a manner that is much closer to the human manner of thinking, to the point she has no desire to rebel in the way the geth did.

The Legends history of droids included a revolution of sorts, so droids are no longer built to be sapient (the original Star Wars novelization has all kinds of nasty things that could happen to 3PO's brainbox if he though beyond his parameters.)

TPM droid control ships just don't make sense, unless B1s were converted from general location-based service drones, with "class 2" (stupid brains: "do x,y, then z"), with occasional "class 1" input (job re-programming or something.)