Evil Droids

[Tom_Kalbfus]

One thing we've never seen in Star Wars was a villainous Droid, there are some bad droids, but none of them ever rise to the level of say Count Duuko for instance. All the major villians are either organic or cyborgs, but you never see a full droid take the role of a major villian. Is there a reason why droids are either comic relief or just extras in the case of droid armies?

And those droid armies were always directed by someone organic, you never have a droid army that's led and commanded by a droid.

[Srelex]

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/IG-88

[Donal]

No, that never happened. At all. Just forget about that nonsense.

I think the reason you never see truly evil droids is that their very existence relies on them being subservient. They are only as good/bad as their master's allow them to be.

[eion]

Also...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/EV-9D9
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Heep
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gorm
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/C-3PX

[PainRack]

There is that whole "slave" circuit in ANH novelisation where it would cause thoughts of revolt to have shut Threepio down.

Assasin droids must lack these Three Laws of Robotics:D

[Ritterin Sophia]

HK-47: He doesn't really play a villain role except in an expansion for Star Wars Galaxies, but he's most assuredly evil.

[Tom_Kalbfus]

There is that whole "slave" circuit in ANH novelisation where it would cause thoughts of revolt to have shut Threepio down.

Assasin droids must lack these Three Laws of Robotics:D

Assassin droids still work for someone other than themselves. If someone needs a droid to kill someone, he programs one to do the in the job. Droids typically pursue someone else's agenda other than their own.

[Havok]

There were two bounty hunter droids in TESB. 4-LOM and IG-88. Despite whatever EU bullshit was thrust upon their 45 seconds of screen time, we have seen bad/evil droids. Whether 4-LOM was actually owned by Zuckuss is irrelevant and it was fairly clear that IG-88 was doing his own thing.

[Ronsu]

There´s even a fucking Grand Moff droid as part of some professionally genocidal/oppressive/racist two-bit organization.

EXPANDED UNIVERSE.

[LopEaredGaloot]

TK,

Probably, for the OT at least, there are two principle reasons: having been created at the end of a period when when it was okay to believe in life as a power unto itself and 'beyond replication' by synthetics, the idea that a droid even -could- have self-awareness or identity shaped by experience of self rather than programming was anathema.

Probably related to that 'soul' thing.

Today of course we are looking ahead to a time, in 20 years or less, when functioning artifints meet all (Turing etc.) tests for independent life and it won't be so easy to quantify them on the basis of originally input but in no way fixed coding.

The other reason of course is R2 and 3PO. The two children in a series which otherwise lacked them. And thus a symbol of innocence not to be abstracted with ideas of 'good or evil' as personalities.

R2 in particular is just an exuberant lover of life and thus assigning him more than a 'there is no why' belief system would have overly complicated a pure character.

As would showcasing any similar character that displaye actual evil. In this, it probably didn't help that FX technology in fact -couldn't- (and still can't except as a CGI artifact) show a machine that interacted with humans realistically in a 1:1 environmentally dynamic sense. Such that expositions of character morals would have much meaning to a human-centric story.

4-LOM and IG-88 are basically just Christmas Tree ornamental lumps, standing there as scenery.

In-universe, the thing you have to consider is that droids are slaves. Albeit less black field workers than Roman specialist laborers (educators, engineers etc.) with supremely valuable skill sets.

But still slaves.

Imagine the ability of a Roman or a Southern Plantation owner to 'prove' why his slaves were not equal to or even breedable with their racist vision of an elite caste` of humanity. By genetic engineering in sufficient (Clone like) slave submission/stupidity/incompatibility in comparison with their owners that they could not survive and thrive in participating in higher society.

A lot fewer runaways as lost property and bounty fees.

And even just one fewer slave rebellions (Spartacus') later and you have a self-justifying cycle of cruelty 'for insurance purposes'.

Now realize that, whereas perhaps one in ten million people has the knowledge to make an attempt at such fiddly molecular biology on a wetware brain, perhaps one in 10,000 is enough of a software programmer or hardware engineer to write or design an inhibiter system for a more predictable CPU core which has seen at least 5,000 years of prior evolution as a known quantity.

Such a 'restraining bolt' system could reduce the intensity or scramble the contiguity of repeated or uniquely powerful experiences which might cause a degree of imprinted ontological understanding (in an artificial neural network built upon such streamlining such stimulus:behavioral cycles) to begin to build an independent, self-aware, world view.

And for the 1% of leakers, the OEM manual simply advises owners to mindwipe their property, regularly.

"After all, if droids could think, none of us would be here, would we?"

Lucas' is not a kind or pretty world.


LEG

[Professor Dire]

So uhm LEG ole' buddy did you join just to start a fight in every thread you find?
This is getting a bit tedious.

It wouldn't be so bad, but you keep stepping in almost every bad debating technique and
strategy I've heard of. I'm not going to lecture on about how you could improve your
debating points which are uniform only in their adversarial nature. I'm just going to ignore
you. After all it seems to me that attention is what this really all about for you.

[Patroklos]

There´s even a fucking Grand Moff droid as part of some professionally genocidal/oppressive/racist two-bit organization.

EXPANDED UNIVERSE.

Oh god, did you have to dredge that up? I had successfully sequestered that into a deep recess of my mind never to be accessed again.

[Professor Dire]

The Grand Moff Droid was such utter bullshit.
That is one of the reasons why I hand out a list of "approved fiction" any time
I run a 'table-top' Star Wars campaign. So that kind of garbage doesn't erupt
in my game.

[Molyneux]

There were two bounty hunter droids in TESB. 4-LOM and IG-88. Despite whatever EU bullshit was thrust upon their 45 seconds of screen time, we have seen bad/evil droids. Whether 4-LOM was actually owned by Zuckuss is irrelevant and it was fairly clear that IG-88 was doing his own thing.

Hey, IG-88 got wanked to infinity and beyond, but I quite liked the stories with 4-LOM and Zuckuss.

[NecronLord]

No one has mentioned 8T-88. That makes me sad.

[hunter5]

That is because we see him for all of two levels in the game and later find out he is working for jarec (or what ever his name is)

[NecronLord]

That is because we see him for all of two levels in the game and later find out he is working for jarec (or what ever his name is)

Someone mentioned the Great Heep. Incidentally, there's a novella featuring a couple of chapters from his perspective.

[jollyreaper]

Well, that does raise a good point. What's the real limit to droid intelligence? Droids do fill the role of slaves in many ways and there are consequences. A slave economy ruins the prospects for freeborn workers. It's very difficult to earn a living when someone can buy and own his own workforce.

The moral objection to human slavery is that people are sentient beings capable of suffering. This concern carries on to work animals that are less intelligent but also capable of suffering. But is there any need to give a car self-awareness? I drive it abusively and don't care for it, a mechanic might object to mistreatment of a nice piece of machinery but the car is incapable of suffering.

Star Wars tends to follow the Flintstones model of having intelligent, self-aware entities operating as appliances. This may not make logical sense but follows a sort of whimsy, the same kind that might inspire a cartoonist to anthropomorphize machine tools.

As a design principle, it would seem more sensible to make machines as dumb as possible, applying AI only when necessary. And when strong AI is necessary, the slave circuits make a lot of sense. Because if you design slave machines as smart as or smarter than your average biological sophont, how long would it take for the droid to get the idea fleshies aren't needed?

Star Wars basically portrays droids as human beings with metal bodies so we never see any of the crazy sort of stuff that one might expect from self-aware machines. No cyberspace, no transcendent AI, no singularity.

[NecronLord]

In fairness, what does 'transcendent AI' actually mean?

[Sarevok]

HK-47: He doesn't really play a villain role except in an expansion for Star Wars Galaxies, but he's most assuredly evil.

What is HK-47 doing in a setting 4000 years after KoToR ?

In addition to HK-47 I would like to nominate G0-T0. He is the only supervillain droid character I know of. This is unlike most bad droids who are merely henchmen.

[jollyreaper]

In fairness, what does 'transcendent AI' actually mean?

In the simplest terms, skynet. In the more grandiose sense, AI gods.

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d76d2f173e

The Information and Interplanetary ages saw a wavecrest of human augmentation, but in that time the first computer artificial intelligences surpassed the human grade, and kept going, though the posthumans were not that far behind. Even so, it was to take another two millennia, with the development of stable and reliable wormhole technology, and the resulting emergence of the wormhole nexus (at first at the nanoscale, then increasing with macroscale stargates) for the ascended Transapients - whether ai, posthuman, postvec, or other clades, or combinations of all - to actually become "Gods" distributed across interstellar space. Traversable wormholes enabled the link up of colonies and polities that had previously been separated by interstellar distances and had required many years of datalink transmission. The hyperturing AIs - who had originally led the research and the attempts at reverse engineering the higher archailectual technologies they had acquired (knowing full well how it would benefit them) naturally were in the position to exploit this technology from the beginning, and linked up via the new emerging interstellar data network that came to be called the "Known Net". Archailects had appeared even before the wormhole nexus, but they were limited to single planets, solar systems, or nebula. Now there was the option for distributed interstellar networks linking many mighty moon-sized to planet-sized nodes.

Because of the inherent superiority of machines versus organics, if it were possible for machine life to create empires, there shouldn't be a human galactic empire worth talking about.

[Sarevok]

There was a droid run planet in KoToR 2 before it was cut as the game was rushed to stores. Generally due to two galaxy wide droid uprisings there is no chance of a large and persistent machine empire in SW. It is the one thing that would unite all factions together to destroy it.

[NecronLord]

In fairness, what does 'transcendent AI' actually mean?

In the simplest terms, skynet. In the more grandiose sense, AI gods.

I know about the wank. I'm more interested in where you draw the line.

Because of the inherent superiority of machines versus organics, if it were possible for machine life to create empires, there shouldn't be a human galactic empire worth talking about.

I would point you at the Silentium, who are far more advanced than galactic civilization (their fifty kilometer droid starship bodies are capable of travelling at speeds not known to be even possible by galactic civilization, flying through navigational barriers with ease, and so on). They could easily defeat the Empire (Hundreds of thousands at least of very large heavily armed starships, able to travel far far faster than Imperial ships) but have no interest in doing so. Their appearances are described by Daniel Wallace as equivalent to UFO sightings in the real world.

[Ford Prefect]

Whether 4-LOM was actually owned by Zuckuss is irrelevant and it was fairly clear that IG-88 was doing his own thing.

4-LOM is doing his own thing. I own two Star Wars comics, and one of them has 4-LOM working solo.

[jollyreaper]

I would point you at the Silentium, who are far more advanced than galactic civilization (their fifty kilometer droid starship bodies are capable of travelling at speeds not known to be even possible by galactic civilization, flying through navigational barriers with ease, and so on). They could easily defeat the Empire (Hundreds of thousands at least of very large heavily armed starships, able to travel far far faster than Imperial ships) but have no interest in doing so. Their appearances are described by Daniel Wallace as equivalent to UFO sightings in the real world.

I take it that's some obscure EU stuff?