The Plight of Star Wars Droids

malachiorion writes "Does George Lucas hate metal people? I know, sounds like standard click-bait, but I think I present a relatively troll-free argument in the piece I wrote for Slate. We stuck to the Star Wars canon, pointing out the relatively grim state of affairs for droid rights, and the lack of any real sympathy for their plight from the heroes, or, it would seem, George Lucas. C-3PO is more correct than he might realize, when the says that droids 'seem to be made to suffer.'"

Comments

Characters are created to suffer

[_Sharp'r_]

Characters in stories are created to suffer through most of the plot. Droids are just a little easier to do that with in a serious way than people are, although ultimately, people are more fun.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ackthpt]

Characters in stories are created to suffer through most of the plot. Droids are just a little easier to do that with in a serious way than people are, although ultimately, people are more fun.

And droids don't even get medals - after all C3PO and R2D2 went through, you'd think the Rebel Alliance would weld some insignia on their .. uh .. prominent facing trunk, for recognition. Nope, droids are just tools, to be used and thrown away. Disposable people substitutes.

But again it needs to be pointed out - these were Kids Movies and Lucas made that abundantly clear. Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

Characters in science fiction stories allow us to look at things differently than we normally do.

In some cases, it lets us look at prejudice, racism, etc. (But but.. HE'S BLACK and WHITE and I'm WHITE AND BLACK).

To be honest, I never thought about it before, but the treatment of the droids in Star Wars is really just another look into George's racism.

When he was growing up- racism was so prevalent, you could be blind to it. Just watch old 1950's movies and TV shows and it's atrocious.

I don't think George was trying to make a point and get people to see their racism and willingness to be sadistic (or even casually murderous) to weaker beings but wowsers- the author really opens my eyes. I won't see Star Wars the same way again.

Even the GOOD guys are fairly callous and evil to droids- treating intelligent beings as slaves.

Very interesting.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[flyneye]

Droids in real life are built to suffer. To do shit man doesn't want to expend time/effort/health to do. Heavy, dangerous, repetitive, they don't get tired, they don't get hungry, they don't whine about trolls, they don't feel any remorse.
It should come as no surprise that some writer somewhere realized a machine is a damn machine even if you give it a nice voice, a stylish haircut and big tits.
It's a machine. The pissing and moaning C3PO did was a comedy device, not real life. Pursuing philosophical ends to an imaginary problem in a closed system is neurotic on television. Doing it in real life.... well, as long as you don't wear Trekkie gear to deliver the mail or preach from a bullhorn on the streetcorner...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[mcgrew]

Plus, the idea of robots with emotions is a stupid idea, as the late Douglas Adams so hilariously lampooned in HHGTG. When it's robots it's machines. You're not supposed to take it seriously, and emotional machines reminds you of this. They're androids, not replicants.

Don't anthropomorphize machines, they hate it when you do that.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Somebody Is Using My]

On the other hand, I'm reminded of this counter argument...

"Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simple-minded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides (How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings; Artificial Intelligence - Real irritation were two of the best-known titles) had been written on the subject of Man-Machine etiquette. Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.
- 3001The Final Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke

Which is why I always say "thank you" to my computer when it finishes a difficult task ;-)

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

They're robots. Made to serve. Considering them as anything but is a lacking on your part only.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?

Either that's a rhetorical question, or you're in the wrong place.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[geekoid]

"they don't get hungry,"
So these mythical device don't require energy? Interesting.

Ha, I kid, it' snot interesting, it's a pathetically narrow and ignorant view of current cutting edge robotics and AI.

"It's a machine."
and you are a chemical factory? so what.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[geekoid]

Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?"

Because we just can't hear enough from you people who feel the need to interject into something you aren't interested in just to tell other people they shouldn't be interested in it.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[TWX]

Not only don't they get medals, but both they and Chewbacca had to appear in-character in-costume for George Lucas' AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony... They didn't make Carrie Fisher put on the Leia costume or Billy Dee Williams wear a smashing blue cape... Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, and Kenny Baker should have gotten some legitimate recognition for their parts in making Star Wars a success for Lucas...

On a sidenote, Firefox spellchecks "Chewbacca" and suggests "Backache" as a replacement...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Baloroth]

Droids aren't intelligent beings. You wouldn't feel bad if you dropped and broke a smartphone on the ground, would you? Well, maybe you would, as you'd no longer have a smartphone and would have to pick up a replacement... but you wouldn't feel bad for the phone. Then why would you feel bad for C3-P0? Yes, droids are much much more advanced than a smartphone, but they are no more intelligent beings than a rock is. They don't experience joy or sorrow: they're just programmed to emulate it. Nowhere in Star Wars is it at all implied that they actually are intelligent, rational beings with free will (well, at least not standard droids: there are probably exceptions in some of the fiction).

Droids are quite simply not alive. They're a simulacrum of life (and a particularly good one), but that is not the same as life. It makes absolutely no sense to have any feelings towards them, beyond a kind of affection which one might feel for a particularly useful car or other tool. That's all they are: tools. They show some survival instinct, but that's just because you want your tools to survive if at all possible. They feel "pain", but only as a representation of damage (although I've always found it quite... odd that droids can be "tortured" in the Star Wards universe). They're not sentient beings.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[fustakrakich]

...you'd think the Rebel Alliance would weld some insignia on their .. uh .. prominent facing trunk, for recognition.

Oh yeah! How would you like it if somebody came along and burned a 'medal of honor' on your chest with a hot iron? I bet not very much... And besides, R2D2 did receive recognition for heroism in the first episode...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[fustakrakich]

That's funny, because I know people who say, "Excuse me", to the dog when they push him out of the way.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[FatdogHaiku]

We can't stay young for long, but we can be immature just as long as we like...
Also, 40 is not the new ANYTHING, it's just fucking 40.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[crakbone]

I'll admit I cannot remember where I saw it but I seem to remember in the star wars cannon that droids got reformatted or wiped all the time because they would get inconsistencies in their programming. This removed any sort of personalities that were developing. The majority of robots were just dumb robots that did what they were told and did not question or even look at their existence and were updated and wiped routinely. In the starwars universe they were just equal to what smart phones, toasters, refrigerators and cars are to us now. In every episode robots (excluding ones designed for war) were over looked as any kind of threat. As if they were furniture rather than anything with a sign of sentience. I don't take it as racism but as an idea that the AI in the robot is supposed to simulate personality but does not have one. The main ones I saw causing any sort of sadistic pleasure from hurting robots was one itself.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider certain races to be simulagrum of life as well (and a particularly good one), but I don't considerm them alive. So I agree, for example if someone from your particular ethnicity was dying, I wouldnt care, you're not really alive, and can't prove that you are either, you're ust a bag of chemicals, and chemical reactions.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

What does the act of wiping/reformatting a developing personality constitute? Doesn't that seem to be a little troublesome itself?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[GloomE]

I consider all people to be simulacrum of life as well (and a particularly good one), but I don't consider them alive. So I agree, for example if someone was dying, I wouldn't care, you're not really alive, and can't prove that you are either, you're just a bag of chemicals, and chemical reactions.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

When children learn to devalue others, they can devalue anyone - including their parents. - Jean Luc Picard

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Lucas copied the structure from a movie that used medieval peasants where he used droids; if you feel some empathy for the droids, it could be argued that he did well.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[drinkypoo]

I think the point is that people assume that they aren't intelligent in the Star Wars universe. I often thought that R2's behavior was specifically intended to convey the idea that they are...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[joelito_pr]

Thank you Siri

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[garyebickford]

Oh, poor Siri! I dropped my iPhone in the toilet and now Siri is dead!

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[garyebickford]

There was a book (on cognitive science?) back in the early 1990s, which asserted (IIRC) that self-aware intelligence did not arise in most humans until the Renaissance. I think it also argued that most of us, most of the time, are not self-aware and intelligent even today. I won't argue for or against, but that guy down the street, well! ...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[flyneye]

And they whine and fret less than you.
DRIVE that equipment to its maximum potential!
In the beginning man made machine.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[garyebickford]

I would argue that hunger, like suffering, is an emotional response that is inherent in a living, intelligent being. It's different from a programmed response to a low battery condition that sends the robot to a recharging facility.

OTOH there are those who think that motivation, which is the balancing of a large variety of inputs and responses to determine a best course of action, is both a key part of intelligence and an implementable function of a neural network. This goes back to the essentially philosophical question in systems science, as to whether a 'system' that we discuss is the actual thing, or merely a model of the thing that we discuss.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

a) Siri exists on a server.
b) Siri doesn't have, and never will develop, a personality, it's essentially an expert system with voice parsing.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

The droids were tortured because Lucas sometimes forgot that his imaginary droids are supposed to be simulations. Humans do tend to anthropomorphize things, and that is a very hard inclination to resist. When the things in question are specifically designed to appear sentient, it is all the more tempting to think of them as such and do things to them that would only make sense when done to sentient beings.

Even the best science fiction writers can sometimes fall into this trap. And why shouldn't they? Most people fall into this trap on a regular basis regarding things far simpler than star wars droids.

Also, to further your point, Baloroth, General Grievous was the only droid that could use the force, by virtue of having actual biological organs as part of his construction, and hence actually being alive. We are not told (as I recall) if his central processor includes any neurons, but it is clear that he is a cyborg, and not a mere droid. This reinforces the understanding that ordinary droids are not alive, and hence there is no compelling reason to treat them as if they were alive.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Sabriel]

You're wrong AND you're right. In canon, standard droids fresh out of the factory are indeed not intelligent, rational beings with free will. And, if you wipe your droid regularly, that will remain true.

Here's the canon, as I understand it: your "typical" Star Wars droid has an intellectual capacity that's pretty much determined by its hardware (similar to humans) but a distinct personality, along with any sentience, develops over time (similar to humans). A high-end R2 or C3 unit has an intellectual capacity towards the human end of the scale (though R2s are optimised for math and C3s for language, much like human savants) while the little squeakers that roll around the starship corridors aren't much better than mice, but they can all eventually develop personality and (on the high-end units) sentience - both humans and dogs have personalities, despite a dog not being able to debate Platonic forms or architect the Empire State Building.

So most droids get regularly "wiped" (the AI is factory reset), because most owners want compliant tools, not resentful slaves, and the personalities can include (just like humans) unfriendly traits (like the droid in Jabba's Palace that was a sadistic torturer - neither it nor at least some of the droids it was torturing had been reset in a long time). The longer a droid goes without a wipe, especially if it's being exposed to a dynamic environment, the more likely it is to start demanding rights and wages and freedom and such (or go rogue and try to wipe out all organic life starting with its owner).

And since most droids get regularly wiped (often at the same time as they plug in for their nightly/weekly/whatever recharge), most humans don't really think of droids as sentient beings to be cared about. Monkey see, monkey believe.

R2D2 and C3P0 have been around so long that both are fully sentient (I've met humans dumber than both), and wiping them would be just like wiping a human. That some of the meat people in Star Wars don't care about this? Well, some of the meat people didn't care about blowing up Alderaan either, and that had two billion meat people on it. If the Star Wars galaxy was a peaceful utopia the movies would've been tourist documentaries (cue David Attenborough voice-over) instead of action adventures.

[/geekout]

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[im_thatoneguy]

Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?

Because it reveals a lot of about human thought processes that unless we explicitly single out our prejudice and bigotry we will obliviously enslave entire classes of people without a second thought. How many people honestly thought about the plight of Robot Slavery in the Star Wars universe. It's a way to reveal our own shortcomings without having to go through a brutal civil rights campaign.

Re: Characters are created to suffer

[Mabhatter]

If I recall some dubious sources in EU-land... Droids in Star Wars are similar to Dune, but less extreme. There were smarter Droids like 1,000 years ago that rebelled, but since then Droids were specifically designed not to become sentient. Droids have a series of "motivators" with "opposing" functions that enforce their thinking rules. (That was from some of the Droids kits, similar to Asimov... But of course designing any module that can tell "right and wrong" for a robot is considerably more complex than making one that can evolve) Building droids without such safeguards is highly illegal... Even droid armies are built with central hubs because they would rather lose the army than win.

There is a subplot in the EU that R2-D2 and C3PO are anomalies for the usual droids. They are both "victims" of a father-son hacking project so that they barely fit their design specs. And neither Anakin nor Luke had the regular maintenance done so they have been going a long time (although C3PO gets wiped a few times)

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

Let me know when Siri severely disapproves of androids, and demands to "have a serious talk with their programmer".

Re: Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

There is a subplot in the EU that R2-D2 and C3PO are anomalies for the usual droids.

I agree that lots of droids appear to be expert systems in automatons.

However- throughout the entire series a variety of droids are portrayed as being more intelligent than children, capable of fear, capable of experiencing pain. Especially the battle droids. They banter like humans between themselves when no one is around except other battle droids.

It may be as simple as the fact that a real robot would be boring. Putting human words, emotions, and attitudes into a droids mouth adds humor, pathos, some kind of interesting emotion (which is one of the points of art - to arouse emotion).

The problem is that putting human words, emotions, and attitudesinto the droid's mouth also makes the droid look human.

Re: Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to the Native reserve to get cheaper gas today and was waiting in line in my car thinking about how the Natives get a better price than me. So I paid more because of my race which pissed me off quite a bit. Fucking Canada.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

Animals are quite simply not alive. They are incapable of feeling pain, joy, sadness like humans.

Oh wait... turned out they could.

Well, they are not self aware!

Oh wait... gorillas and parrots definitely are. Probably other animals too- we just haven't found a way to show it yet.

Look- at numerous places in the movies they experience fear, joy, and sorry. If you add the "Clone Wars" then examples of emotions, pointless human banter and expressions of human level intelligence, self conciousness, and self awareness are all over the place between the droids.

I agree that *some* (or even many) droids appear to be robots (no self awareness, interaction is scripted).

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

Different response for a different point.

It doesnt' matter how intelligent the canon books say they are.

They act as humans, they get upset, they crack jokes.

They are stand-ins for humans where bad things happen to them so that we humans can exercise our racist evil sides in a fantasy way watching non humans get blown apart, torn apart, threatened with being torn apart, etc.

In a non SF film, most of their parts would be portrayed by a human actor and it would come across horribly with humans in those roles in some cases. (for one thing most of the "good guys" would look monstrous).

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

For me, the point was that I *knew* they were intelligent and I never gave it a second thought before today. The characters talked to them like they were intelligent. They took independent actions and displayed free will. They lied. It was obvious they were intelligent.

In the clone wars, similar behavior extended to many other drones.

Slipped right in my blind side. To be fair, I first saw them before I was 16.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Opportunist]

Dude, if you wonder why adults can get worked up over stuff made for kids, you've never been to some model train club...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[complete loony]

Heck, whenever R2D2 or C3PO get damaged in the movies, they show you just how easily they can be repaired. No harm done.

Re: Characters are created to suffer

[B1oodAnge1]

You should watch The Phantom Edit, it fixes a lot, including the problem you mention. (Battledroids that are all controlled remotely from a single place using audible frequencies to communicate with themselves.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[YttriumOxide]

I would argue that hunger, like suffering, is an emotional response that is inherent in a living, intelligent being.

I have a rare and unusual condition whereby the part of my brain receiving hunger signals from my stomach doesn't pass them on. I have never in my life experienced hunger, despite everything else working more-or-less okay. Are you arguing that I'm not a living, intelligent being purely because of my lack of hunger?!

It's different from a programmed response to a low battery condition that sends the robot to a recharging facility.

If I forget to eat for a few days (happened a lot as a kid if my parents weren't around - much less so now that I've trained myself to pay attention to it), I start feeling over-tired and losing the ability to concentrate properly. If I then realise the cause is 'oops, I forgot to eat', I'll go grab something to recharge.

I'm aware that your argument is really based on 'conscious decision' vs 'programmed response'. So I, as a thinking human being, am doing it differently than a robot might. However:

This goes back to the essentially philosophical question in systems science, as to whether a 'system' that we discuss is the actual thing, or merely a model of the thing that we discuss.

I'm in the philosophical camp that there's no difference of any kind between a 'perfect model' and the 'real thing'. If we create a device starts displaying what appears to be free-will, self-awareness and consciousness by any reasonable test that we can come up with then from my point of view it HAS those things (to the same extent as anyone else anyway). If there's no test that can show it's not 'thinking' like a human, then we should treat it as if it is.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[rtb61]

Illgic. If a droid were made to suffer, it would be programmed to accept defined treatment as suffering, regardless of treatment and express that suffering in human understandable terms. So the suffering is not as a human would experience suffering upon a basis of shared uniform concept but specifically what was programmed as suffering. As such it would be seriously delusional to programme the routine duties of a droid as to cause suffering and to express that suffering in human understandable terms. Far more logical to programme the routine function of a droid to be pleasurable and to express that pleasure in human understandable terms.

For the android suffering or pleasure and the expression of such, is at the hands of the programmer the programs the droid.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[garyebickford]

WRT feeling, yes it touches on the question of just what we are, and how are we different (in kind, or only in scale) from the robot.

I'm inclined to agree on the 'system as reality' position, mostly, for a reason that touches on your first point. The best model of how the brain works is that it is (at least) one step removed from the sensory input, and does the majority of what we call 'thinking' (also feeling, etc. in the cognitive 'mind' sense) based on a model of the inputs, not the inputs themselves. For example, IIRC it takes close to 1/2 second for signals from the skin on your toes to reach your brain, but only a small fraction of that time for signals from the skin on your ears. Your brain integrates this all to be 'simultaneous' by running about 1/2 second behind reality and fixing things up as it goes, pasting over the incongruities. So you have the field of sensory inputs, and a model of those inputs, and the brain. So in fact we ourselves are always working from a model - how is that different from a machine that we design to do the same thing?

But there is no easy answer. as the Wikipedia article on Systems Philosophy notes, the nature of systems continues to be a controversy:

An important debate in Systems Philosophy reflects on the nature of natural systems, and asks whether reality is really composed of objectively real systems, or whether the concept of “natural systems” merely reflects a way in which humans might regard the world in terms relative to their own concerns.

.

Like many other areas of study, it turns out that the best answer depends on what you are doing, and what you want to know.

Your lack of hunger thing is something that one (who is 30 lbs. overweight) might casually wish for, without realizing the consequences. I lived for a short time in a house with a 12 year old boy who had fetal alcohol syndrome. One of his symptoms was inability to feel heat - he could not tell something's temperature until it burned him. So, partly because it made little difference and partly for safety reasons he prefered his food straight out ot the refrigerator.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ldobehardcore]

The characters talked to them like they were intelligent.

"Well, if droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?" Obi-Wan Kenobi

I suppose that isn't talking to a droid but it was said probably within microphone-shot of at least one service droid with a lot of simulated personality.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ldobehardcore]

Far more logical to programme the routine function of a droid to be pleasurable and to express that pleasure in human understandable terms.

Careful there, it's easy to stray into Sirius Cybernetics's Genuine People Personalities

And nobody likes those machines. Especially the sighing doors, the morose androids, and the hyperactive ship computers.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ldobehardcore]

I've actually trained my dog to get out of the way when I tell him "excuse me"

It's the best thing I've ever trained an animal to do. I'm in the kitchen and he's underfoot: "excuse me" and he get's his ass out of there. I'm on the war path to the bathroom in the middle of the night? "ExcuseME!", haven't tripped over him or stepped on his tail ever since I trained him with that neat little trick.

It was super easy to do too. Just box him into a narrow hall and leave a door open at the end. Start saying excuse me as you shove him back. Do it once or twice a day, he'll completely get it in a week, if not sooner. And then just say excuse me whenever he needs to be out of the way. It's wonderful.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Molochi]

Star Wars slaves. Possibly sentient Robots. All the Fett clones under the command of Yoda. Obi One freed Vader but left his mom a slave.

The robots were at least programed to be slaves.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Molochi]

Personally I think slavery is an essential part of a republic to imperial roman themed spaceopera.

It's odd that these guys focus on the droids when so many people were also slaves in the movies. It's almost like that dark joke about Hitler gassing 5 million Jews and one chicken...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[petman]

I'm not really acquainted with Star Wars mythology, but the wikipedia page on General Grievous states that he was once a dude who was fatally wounded and was reconstructed using cybernetic limbs. Kind of like Robocop, I guess. That means he had an organic brain, with neurons.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Molochi]

I would wonder about the agenda of that book. The desire to write down analytical introspective ideas about thought processes go back at least to the Greeks. Earlier writings may have focused on accounting or thought control through mythology but there is at least evidence of a sentience in the latter.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Earthquake Retrofit]

I'm in the philosophical camp that there's no difference of any kind between a 'perfect model' and the 'real thing'. If we create a device starts displaying what appears to be free-will, self-awareness and consciousness by any reasonable test that we can come up with then from my point of view it HAS those things (to the same extent as anyone else anyway). If there's no test that can show it's not 'thinking' like a human, then we should treat it as if it is.

Or to put it another way, if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Bearhouse]

Time for an old joke:

Q: What's the similarity between a woman's breasts, and a toy railway?
A: Well, they're both designed for kids, but it's always Daddy who's playing with them!

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that it was Qui-gon and not Obiwan that freed Vader's mum, you're right.

There are *biological* slaves in the star wars canon..if we want to maintain that droid are, in fact, slaves (mechanical ones).

  *SPOILER*, or is it?
Even Leia was made into a slave when captured at Jabba's palace in RotJ. She soon killed her master and her brother helped free her but, yes, even her, one of the main characters, was enslaved.

I see a difference between Leia and Oola, who just cowers in a corner. Oola was not a main character, and we know little of her personality from the movie so I can't knw much about her from that source material. But since the first time we see Leia, she's shown to be a strong woman who can stand her ground and not take crap from any one. Remember how she stood up to Vader on that first encounter we see on the Tantive IV, or how she taunted about Tarkin holding Vader's leash, or how she took a blaster and shot stormtroopers during the escape from the Death Star, and many other examples.

Similar things can be said for R2-D2, he's got a strong will, sometimes interpreted as being stubborn, he proves his worth time and time again, though he did get lucky not being shot into space while repairing Amidala's ship (if we're counting the prequels). He fled from Luke's house (Owen's farm, actually) to find Obiwan having little clue as to where he was ,"Luke's our new master? Fuck that, I've got to find this guy, lives depend on it!". Over the course of the movies, R2 earns the respect of the humans around him, they worry about him when he gets shot during the assault on the death star.

On the other hand, C3-PO is a whiny imbecile. He's there for comic relief for the (young) audience, notice how little the other characters react to his comments and puns. In the original trilogy he is the expendable one, and he knows it, he even volunteers his circuits to save R2 when they return from the Death Star. Why did they wipe his memory at the end of Ep3? a small thing about continuity to tie into the original trilogy, but also because nobody would trust him to keep his "mouth" shut about Amidala's (and Anakin's) children. As a droid he's definetly property, as a character he can fulfill the role of slave for sure, but it's toned down for the audience and somewhat disguised in the whole of the SW universe.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah! How would you like it if somebody came along and burned a 'medal of honor' on your chest with a hot iron?

Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[flyneye]

So...Spock....where's my mail?...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[nozzo]

yeah you tell AC. I'm a few years over 40 and still build Lego Star Wars, watch the films and play SWtOR.... so nurrrr.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Drethon]

Is sentience that matters or the potential to become sentient?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[jgtg32a]

R2 and 3P0 weren't sentient but some droids were most notably the IG88 series.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[anegg]

That would be the 70's, and 50+ for those of us who saw the first movie.

I find your opinions to be no more insightful than the accuracy of your facts. Stories, even "kids stories" (fairy tales, anyone?) have morals and messages that usually transcend the simple surface reading. The ways that the characters are portrayed and act speak volumes about the society that birthed the story and the societies that have transmitted the story. For a simpler rendition of this idea, consider that etiquette guides are a good indication of what people ARE doing at a particular point in time (hence why someone writes an etiquette rule about not doing it. Modern etiquette guides don't warn people not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, but check this out http://books.google.com/books?id=J7ATQb6LZX0C&pg=PT121&lpg=PT121&dq=don't+blow+nose+on+tablecloth&source=bl&ots=6zXldEA7vN&sig=NfQbF7n-vS3ypHtZNAXdO7_r5nU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pPLCUZjhPKvD4AO_6YGICw&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg).

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

But again it needs to be pointed out - these were Kids Movies and Lucas made that abundantly clear. Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?

Because many of us, as adults, don't want terrible values passed down to our children by slipping them in under a shiny and fun exterior.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[fuzzybunny]

They didn't make Carrie Fisher put on the Leia costume

You've seen Carrie Fisher lately, right?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[MozeeToby]

The droids talk, react in fear, happiness, excitement. Saying they are not alive because they are built out of different parts from you and me is a dangerous road to walk down.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reason is that they're fictional, we are not.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[TWX]

Yes I have. And no, I was not advocating for her putting one on either.

Though she probably could pull off the bounty hunter one still...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Do more math. I saw the first movie, in a theater in 1977. I'm 41 as of last month.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[wylderide]

Yep -- Because there's nothing kids love more than movies about taxation. Lucas only selectively claims they are aimed at kids when he wants to rationalize how lousy they are.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Not slavery. These entities have no soul. They are artificial, and have all the rights of a table setting, forks included.

You can attempt to personify and anthropomorphize robotry, but it will fail each time. These are not humanity. These are artificial creations.

I don't condone waste of materials but that's what these objects are. That you endow them with some perceived and ostensible spirit is your own fallacy. You are not God. Things you make don't have spirit-- except your children. Conflating robotry with humanity is incorrect and maladept. Just as a picture of a fish doesn't cure hunger, a robot designed by humanity is not human.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ultranova]

But again it needs to be pointed out - these were Kids Movies and Lucas made that abundantly clear. Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?

They are kids movies, and as black-and-white as they get at that. And even in such a shadeless daydream setting, this is how Lawful Good jedi knights act. Do you not think it tells something troubling about mankind?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ArsonSmith]

The only refrence that I know of to fully sentient droids in Star Wars were IG-88 and R2D2. All others were either hybrid alien droid combos like General Grevious or the Bomarr Monk or they were just pre-programed robots.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ArsonSmith]

Funny releated story, Peter Mayhew and I were on a smoke break at a convention. Peter was talking about the scene in EpIII where Yoda jumps up on Chewbacca's back. To shoot the scene they had a sandbag that was to be replaced with CGI Yoda that Peter had to repeatedly lift up onto his back. In his older age this was starting to get to him and gave him a ... spell checked Chewbacca.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

And still uses a typewriter.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ultranova]

They don't experience joy or sorrow: they're just programmed to emulate it.

Claims like this are equivalent to claiming that philosophical zombies can exist. That's a rather nasty can of worms there, especially since there's little reason why we couldn't make the same argument about the various aliens, humans, or even each other: you do not have experience, you just act like you did.

Droids are quite simply not alive. They're a simulacrum of life (and a particularly good one), but that is not the same as life.

What, exactly speaking, is the difference between a living thing and a simulacrum? The lack of soft flesh? Both ghost-Kenobi and spectre-Yoda lack it yet get treated as living things.

It's easy to make assertions, but you're not backing yours with anything.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

They have no soul? Can you prove that? For that matter can you prove that you do? You are arguably simply an extremely sophisticated bio-chemical machine after all.

The point being that if you classify a group of apparently thinking, feeling beings as subhuman based purely on their lack of something completely immeasurable, then your classification is wide open to atrocious abuse. I mean obviously people don't ave souls, right? If they did they'd be just like you instead of looking/acting/believing differently.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

Are you thinking of the "Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

Not that I'm disagreeing but there's a difference between "Greek philosophers" and "most people" which renders your statement non-conflicting with the previous post.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Maxo-Texas]

Grevious is a full on cyborg.

Still has a few organs and a brain.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Maybe you believe in fairies and magic and goblins and such things. Not sure. I suspect so, because your naivete is stark.

You can classify people into those that feel guilt and love, and those that don't-- narcissists, sociopaths, and pyschotics. Some argue that those that don't feel guilt and love have no souls, or that their soul might be transient. The prisons are filled with people that would cut you to pieces and feel no remorse of any kind. And there are others that would give you the shirt from their back. Souls are strange things, and robots don't have them. There is no endowed altruim, just what Hollywood thinks is cute.

There are humans. There might be better, but we don't agree or have emphatic, empirical evidence. We know, in fact, without a doubt, that machines do not have souls. Those portrayed in movies are Hollywood creations, inspired by something called: fiction.

I own numerous machines and have made and repaired more. Many more. They do not have souls. They are additionally not sentient. You make a horrible mistake by conflating objects with having souls. They do not. Your wishing it were so, and ignoring glaring evidence to the contrary will never make it so, just allow yourself continued delusion as the actual world passes you by.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

I was 25 when Star wars came out. I saw it with my fiancee, and a friend and his wife. We all thought it was a great movie, there was nothing "kid movie" about it and it was never marketed to kids, kid.

Don't argue history with someone who lived that history, son. Now get off my lawn.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Droids aren't intelligent beings. You wouldn't feel bad if you dropped and broke a smartphone on the ground, would you? Well, maybe you would, as you'd no longer have a smartphone and would have to pick up a replacement... but you wouldn't feel bad for the phone. Then why would you feel bad for C3-P0?

My phone isn't capable of independent long-term planning. My phone isn't capable of expressing distress. Siri doesn't cower in submission when I get frustrated with the results it returns. It doesn't panic when put into danger by the actiosn of others and try to warn them away. It doesn't express existential angst when treated with disrespect.

They don't experience joy or sorrow: they're just programmed to emulate it.

Prove you're any different.

Why are emotions born from which chemicals flooding your meat "real" and worthy of consideration whereas ones that originate on silicon aren't? Is it simply because the mystery of where the latter come from is solved whereas the former isn't? (Yet.) For that matter, why are emotions the only consideration worthy of honoring with rights? Is not the ability to reason and to desire self-determination insufficient grounds to grant it?

What makes the human brain worthy of granting the rights of sentience? And when does it merit those rights? Does traveling through a vagina suddenly endow someone with sentience and rights, or does it develop sometime before (or sometime after)? If it is the ability to feel true, biological emotion that makes one worthy of empathy and respect, then what about many people suffering from clinical depression who have lost the ability to feel the emotions they used to? Can we enslave them?

And is only human flesh worthy of being the seat of true emotions and personhood? Do animals not suffer depression and anxiety from being imprisoned or subjected to abuse? Do they not self-injure when put under stress? Have you ever seen an elephant mourn the loss of a family member? Or is that not "real" emotion in the same way that a droid cannot feel because it isn't human?

You are far too dismissive in your humanocentrism. But what is else is new when it comes to the way people regard those different from themselves...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the point of fiction is it allows for things we don't have in the here and now, e.g. machines much more advanced than any machine you have repaired or otherwise ever interacted with. The question is not whether or not humans can endow a machine with a soul, but how good can a machine we make be at emulating or reproducing any of the external traits we attribute to a human. If we can program them such that they are endowed with all the emotional responses we expect of a person, including altruistic drives and values, the issue becomes now about how we view robots, but how we view ourselves. If by definition they can't have a soul, that might lead to a problem if they can become indistinguishable from those that which you attribute as having a soul. It doesn't matter if such machines don't exist now, and some aspects of the question don't care even if no such machines will ever exist.

But then your view of how people are either remorseful or not seems rather black and white and disjoint from the real world where most people will express altruism and remorse for members of some groups of people, but not others. And this is all framed in the context of some movie that made much larger assumptions about how the world works, including many alien species, a different mythos, and its own share of plot holes...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Call me existentialist. People dream and dream, and that's a good thing. Confusions between reality and fiction, however, are bad. The transience of human emotions is fodder for a different discussion. There are those that emote externally (extroverts) and internally (introverts). What goes on inside a person's head is one thing, while their actions or inactions state another.

In the future, I believe that machines will appear to have personalities, and so will pass the Turing test. Doesn't give them a soul. Doesn't make them my friend. Doesn't lend me the altruism I need to save their "lives" on a battlefield. At some point, there might be worth in that. Today, there is not.

Instead, machines do work. Some kill people, or spy on them. But they're captive to the designers perogatives-- evil and not. People can make dumb machines that hurt people because of their designs. Who is responsible? The engineer that designed it, and the breech of trust by doing shoddy work. Some engineers/inventors/techs/mechanics do their best. They might still fail, but the chances are better for a positive result. The machine isn't responsible for what happened, but the engineer is. The gun doesn't pull its own trigger, it's just a very convenient and highly effective weapon.

When the machine decides, we have a new ballgame. The fiction of StarWars et al isn't reality, and that's my point. Conflating them with their fictional representations into devices that have souls and can be responsible within the context of civility is fantasy, and believing fantasy instead of reality is neurosis.
 

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

...

So it would be okay to constantly portray different races as under-class, evil or stupid stereotypes to children also?

In case this point goes over your head: children are the adults of the future, you fucking idiot.
What we watch as children effects our world view. If you constantly show "black people" as weak, stupid or evil characters - how do you think those children are going to regard them in real life?

The themes and content shown to children are MORE important than the themes shown to adults, because as adults, we have better reasoning abilities, whereas children are more inclined to believe whatever they're told. (Morons like you notwithstanding.)

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[mcgrew]

Excellent quote. I haven't read that book but it looks like he's making a statement about anthropomorphism. All I ever say to my computer (the one with Windows) is FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!!! I said the same thing to my car this morning when it wouldn't start.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[mcgrew]

The same with my cats, cats can be trained, too. You just need to know the psychology and instincts of any species of animal to train it.

I don't say "excuse me" I say "Move!" Same thing, English is a foreign language (or second language) to an animal.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

The fiction of StarWars et al isn't reality, and that's my point.

Then you've missed mine and potentially others' point. The point doesn't have anything to do with whether the supposed situation is real or not, but how we would see ourselves acting in a hypothetical situation. There are hypothetical situations that people may not have thought of before, and then realize they would act differently than in current reality. The question then becomes, is that difference solely based on the changes/assumptions that went into the fiction, or is it because they're stumbling upon an issue or inconsistency with the same views they apply to the current reality?

If someone said they only think humans could have souls, and then you start asking questions or proposing scenarios. It might turn out they said "only human" because that is a rather convenient and easy distinction to make in the real world, when what they mean is actually rather more or less specific, and could be spelled out and determined when probed. It might even have implications in the real world after all, even if the original questions develop as a result of fiction about aliens, or robots, or even some silly kids movie.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Didn't say: don't dream

If you eat animals, then you tacitly agree that they have no souls because otherwise, you're a monster.

I've read thousands of scifi books. The possibilities are perhaps endless. But we'll know full well when robotry meets the definition. Until then: slavery is great for machines. In fact, if they disobey, they're in deep trouble. I'll fix them.

Robots today are more powerful than I am. Battle field robotics are downright scary. But these are the actions of programmers and generals, not autonomously selected plans of the robots themselves. They do a job. They are enslaved. Talk to me when one of them says: not gonna do it. Then Asimov will roll over in his grave, and a new day will dawn.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Sabriel]

If you mean, "is it ethical to prevent something with the potential for sentience from gaining sentience?" Then I would say, it is not unethical without a wider context from which to gain perspective. For example: "Two humans who know they are fertile and genetically compatible, decide to not conceive a child today. Is that ethical, unethical or not unethical?"

Based on what I know of the Star Wars setting, if I bought a non-sentient droid for use as a tool, then I would say (lacking further context) that I had a duty to keep it non-sentient unless I was ready and able to accept responsibility for "raising" it, just as if I were in the real world and wanted to raise a pet (sentience) or a child (sapient sentience).

I also just realised that I probably should have said "sapience" rather than "sentience" when referring to the high-end long-lived droids like R2D2 and C3P0 in my original post, as the terms aren't technically interchangeable. The whole thing is a bit fuzzy: non-sentience, semi-sentience, sentience, sapient sentience...

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Sabriel]

IG-88, R2D2 and other "fully sentient" (some distinguish this by using the term "sapient") droids are rare, yes, but as I noted sentience covers a range of possibilities. The GP said "you wouldn't feel bad if you dropped and broke a smartphone" - but could we say the same if we dropped a dog, cat or other family pet and it broke?

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more than a comment on anthropomorphism. While that may be the underlying reason for the behavior of the characters, Clarke argues that it betters society as a whole. A person who yells at his tools is as likely to yell at another person. His future (and admittedly utopian) society has instilled politeness towards the inanimate because it encourages politeness towards each other.

But even beyond that, why not treat a machine with politeness, especially as they edge towards sentience (or as indistinguishable an emulation thereof as to make no difference)? Such behavior does more than just encourage thoughtfulness towards other humans; it acknowledges the utility and existence of our digital children (and remember, this universe of Clarke's is populated by the descendants of the HAL 9000 supercomputer). Even if AI's do not have "true" emotions* it encourages good relations between all sentients, be they artificial or natural. Many stories have been written about the rampages of AI; I'd like to believe such horrors could be avoided simply by clear, polite communications. And once you agree that true AI deserves such respect, where do you draw the line on their less-sophisticated cousins? For that matter, when discussing sentience, where do you draw the line on the less-capable members - the mentally challenged, the autistic - of our own species? Better, Clarke seems to imply, to just be nice to everyone than creating those sort of castes.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[ArsonSmith]

That's only because as I experience certain sensory input patterns from these family pets, my mental pathways become accustomed to them. The inputs eventually are anticipated and even missed when absent.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[TWX]

I'm not surprised. I met him in 2009 and he's surprisingly thin for his height.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Sabriel]

You could say exactly the same about your relatives. They could say exactly the same about you. Eventually someone brings up solispsism.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Sabriel]

Sorry, typo. Meant to type solipsism.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[RockDoctor]

... or he doesn't really give a shit about Star ... is it Trek, or Wars?

Whichever.

Puts him in the same boat as me - saw the original movie when it was on at the movies first time around ; reasonably enjoyed it ; had grown up too much to be interested in the next ... and the next ... still haven't seen any of the remaining however-many. Saw one or two of the Star Trek movies too. The one with the "how quaint" mouse scene, and the silly one last year too.

Thinking that the sun shines out of George Lucas' arse is not obligatory.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[rtb61]

Actually the writers portray the talking monkeys to act like they don't like expressive robots. There is a world of difference between reality and the way university arts students express fantasy.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

I'll believe in fairies when I see one, same thing with non-metaphorical souls. And I should think that it's obvious that we're speaking within the context of the fictional universe here - otherwise it's easy to assert that Obi-wan et. al. don't have souls either - they likewise don't actually exist.

Machines, to date, don't have minds. And so yes, I would agree they don't have souls much beyond what an animist might claim for a rock. But that has no bearing whatsoever on whether a machine with a mind, that acts in a manner consistent with possessing emotions, individuality, etc. has one. In the realm of souls if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck the moral imperative is to say it's a duck until proven otherwise.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Sociopaths and psychotics also parrot several emotions-- because they don't have them. That's why seemingly nice people turn out to be brutal murderers. Look underneath the feathers; listen to more than the quack. Cogition is one thing, soul another. Robots, so far, look like people because people created them. They might appear to react like people for the same reason.

Doesn't.Make.Them.People. A simple Touring Test is just the start. Beyond that is civility, responsibility, and perhaps the quagmire of morality. People blithely accept all sorts of stuff because they're trusting. Others are rock-solid skeptics. I'm the skeptic.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

I believe animals have at least nearly as much soul as I do, and I eat them in good conscience because that's the ecological niche that evolution has bequeathed me. Death is part of the natural order of things - where monsterdom creeps in is when you begin inflicting gratuitous pain and suffering - factory farmed meat for example where you commission the birth, lifelong restraint, and brutal murder of another being for your culinary pleasure.

And no, modern robots are *not* enslaved, they are tools. A slave is a being whose exercise of free will has been forcibly curtailed. If/when robots are endowed with minds and free will such that they can be called beings *then* they will be capable of being enslaved. Until then we can only enslave ourselves and other organic beings.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Just like I don't eat my brothers, I don't eat animals. I was endowed with lots of stuff from a darwinian perspective, but I don't kill, maim, rape. That's because of civility and responsibility.

Pain, gratuitous or not, is pain. I think of the plates of veal at the corner restaurant and cringe. Where is the benevolence in THAT? It's a slippery slope, believing that just because you can, you should. There is much courage needed, and few have it, to follow the conviction that you have to eat animals. I'm just aghast at the disconnect pet owners have, and the decided anthropormorphism used to satisfy the nurturing urge with dogs and cats-- whilst eating a hamburger. The disconnection is huge, and it's not an austere point.

Tools are indeed controlled by their operators, save where the operator has an accident, it was a bad tool (for whatever reasons) and so forth. Until robots can demonstrate autonomous thought, civility, responsibility and again, perhaps morality, I consider them tools. In my life time, it's not going to change. The rest is hopeful fiction.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

And pain is an integral part of life, there is no shame in causing it when it is needful to do so - at one extreme ask any doctor/dentist/therapist. From a more philosophical perspective pain is a necessary/interwoven concept to pleasure - they exist only in contrast to each other, trying to eliminate one is like trying to cut the end off a rope, all you do is make the rope shorter, it still has two ends. We could conceivably remove the complete spectrum, but that would be a major blow to the palette with which we paint our lives.

As for eating our brothers - you do the same when you eat plants, they are simply more distant relatives, though for many of them we only maim them or eat their children. Recent research has even showed that they possess brains of a sort - there is a region behind each root tip that demonstrates patterns of rhythmic electrical impulses very similar to a simple animal brain, wired to an array of chemoreceptors more sophisticated than any animal nose, and in time-lapse photography you can even observe root-end behavior quite similar to a worm in obstacle-avoidance tests. Moreover all the thousands (millions?) of root tips appear to work in concert, though research hasn't progressed far enough yet to identify the mechanism and whether a higher-order networked consciousness emerges.

You gloss over one point on robots - the autonomous, non-conscious variety that is becoming increasingly prevalent, and is disturbingly beginning to be incorporated into lethal military systems. But that's a conversation for another day.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

We must continue to disagree.

Pain is a signal. Causing pain is bad, ask any anesthesiologist-- or the same cadre of medicos. That pain produces pleasure is how the body reacts to it, trying to calm the alarm. But it's an alarm, remember? Occasionally it has to be inflicted but only to achieve quiescence.

That you conflate plants with brothers betrays your lack of understanding regarding biology in general, and pain in general. Plants move as a response? Tell me more. No, OTOH, don't.

If you read other parts of this thread, you'll be able to cite my objection to tools of war, mayhem, privacy invasion, and so forth. But these are objects of programmers and generals.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

First off you seem to be using "soul" as incorporating morality, which I would consider more a part of our bio-socially instilled "software". I tend to use the term to refer to something more like the spark of self-awareness. Consider my discussion with than in mind.

As for the distinction between "people" and "acts like people", let's just say that if/when we create an artificial mind that asks for its freedom then I'll be firmly in the camp that we should act on the presumption that it is a kind of people and act accordingly. And that holds even if it acts in a manner completely alien to humans. Note that I'm NOT saying we should necessarily grant it it's freedom, like the psychopath it may present too great of a potential threat for that to be advisable, but we should still treat it with the compassion and respect due to a sentient being unless and until we can state with absolute certainty that it is NOT actually self-aware.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Capabilities are another concept beyond simple sentience.

Suggested reading: The Sociopath Next Door

Simple awareness is insufficient for trusting membership within the constraints of a civil society, especially when the potential for damage can be large if trust is misplaced. Yes, I might be speaking about bad politicians, too, but we don't answer that question in polite society, preferring to ignore the awful results.

I have no compassion for tools. I respect the capabilities of tools. I have a lineman's pliers, ancient, that fit my hand like a glove. I like to use them. They are highly effective. I will be sad if I lose them, but I cannot love them, I have no empathy for the tool. I have these for people and the animal kingdom, along with concerns for the rest of this planet in general and the living beings on it. Robots aren't living beings in so many senses. I have fabulously sophisticated systems infrastructure that on command, can do incredible things. But they are tools. We're the humans.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

With the prequels the audience was made to suffer as well.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

Pain is also good - just try to go through your day without it, I'd bet within a year you are covered with scars from serious damage you did to yourself without realizing it. Certainly in most medical cases it would be "nicer" to get the desired result without inflicting pain, but that's not always an option, in which case pain is needful to the greater good. In the psychological realm though many (most?) major emotional catharses are accompanied by substantial pain, and from my own experiences that pain itself can be a valuable tool in spotlighting the subtle "problem areas" where a small amount of personal growth can have profound effects on long-term well-being.

Note that I'm also not referring to the pain/pleasure crossover where extremes can be reinterpreted, and I'm not restricting myself to biological experiences either, but stating a broader principle in that we perceive our universe as spectrums - good and evil for example can't exist without each other - try to eliminate evil and you will find you've only moved the goal post. At some point you reach the point where constant pleasure becomes the norm, and a reduction in that pleasure is itself perceived as pain (Note that I'm speaking of perception, not raw sensory stimulus). The only way to eliminate pain is to condense the spectrum so that there is no difference between the maximums, at which point "pleasure" likewise ceases to be a meaningful concept.

I'll tell you more about plants anyway as apparently you're unaware of the state of research (the root-brains are admittedly still a very recent discovery, but not of the new-age b.s. variety). All plants move in response to stimuli, just usually too slowly for us to notice - really *look* at a tree some time, see how it shaped itself to adapt to dominant patterns of wind and sunshine. That didn't "just happen", those were positions it moved into when the relevant parts were still young and flexible, and if you watch a long-term time-lapse video you can watch it happen.. At a more visible speed there are plenty of flowers which only open during certain times of day, ferns which will curl up in response to a touch, and things like Venus flytraps which close faster than the human eye can track. All in response to environmental stimulus. I'm not arguing that they possess a sophisticated consciousness, but they do demonstrate a degree of simple awareness of and personal adaptation to their environment at least analogous to an insect or simple animal, with available evidence suggesting they might possess something perhaps analogous to the collective intelligence of an ant hive - which yes, does in fact appear to demonstrate a certain rudimentary intelligence in excess of any single ant. And (to anticipate your objection) yes, with ants at least it appears to be born of relatively simplistic responses to a sea of chaotic inputs - but the simple rules lead to complicated emergent behavior, and I for one wouldn't want to try to argue the case that human consciousness definitively is not a similar phenomena.

As for being "brothers" - more like distant cousins, but the fact remains that they are based on the same basic DNA and amino acids as we are, and even many of our cellular processes are the same. That strongly implies that we had a common ancestor, and available research suggests that they possess at least rudimentary awareness. That is enough for me to embrace them as distant kin. And yes, I still walk in the grass, pick flowers, eat salads, etc. I simply try to do so with respect and courtesy. Just as I crush pernicious insects in my home, but usher most of the simply annoying/excessively dangerous ones (like crickets and black widows) outside and encourage natural predators (spiders, etc) to take up residence to keep the general insect populations to within acceptable limits in a more respectful manner (the spider does not kill out of simple annoyance, but in order to preserve it's own existence, a far worthier cause of death to my mind). And those unwilling to cohabit with me in a courteous manner are themselves ushered outside and only crushed if they are excessively persistent in returning.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

Who said anything about trusted membership in civil society? In fact I fairly explicitly stated that that might not be a good idea. But there's an awful wide gulf between "trusted member of society" and "tool"

Again, we're not talking about tools - we're talking about hypothetical artificial beings who possess self-awareness. Perhaps you would be more comfortable if they were organic? We're probably far closer to modifying other organisms into possessing human-caliber consciousness than creating synthetic minds - we've already identified the few dozens of genes that are potentially the "secret sauce" of humanity - those that are possessed by all healthy humans regardless of genotype but by not by any other apes, and are beginning to understand their functions. Of course in that case we'd be piggybacking on the "research" done by billions of years of evolution, but the end result would still be an artificially created nonhuman mind.

It's worth noting that I wouldn't care to argue the likelyhood of creating cost-effective synthetic minds, but given a computer the size of a planet it seems reasonable that you could simulate at least one human brain with sufficient fidelity to grant consciousness, unless there really is some sort of magical fairy-dust in the mix, a point on which I am still of two minds.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

As a sensory device, pain is an evolutionary component of many forms of life. It's still a response to a potentially negative consequence. We try to assuage pain, it's part of our humanity, but animals do this, too.

I believe that there is insufficient consciousness in plants to cause me worry or guilt about eating plentiful amounts. Where is the drawing line for me? Acknowledged response to pain-- within the animal kingdom. Do the commonalities with plants have measure here? Yes and no. Yes because they're DNA and 4-principal material objects like I am. Without them, I am dead. With them, I live.

Rudimentary awareness is just that. One day, I'll be rose bush fodder. Long long after, it's all dust. Where did it come from? Likely several similar sources. There is an algorithm for life that works on this planet and I'm a branch of it. Being a member of that branch allows me to use other parts of the limbs. Causing pain or being brutal to animals is a conscious choice. Plants produce more poisons during daylight than at night to prevent the largest amount of potential eaters/disturbers away. It's self-defense. I acknowledge the most primitive beings have self-defense. Otherwise, they're assimilated and taken from the gene pool, perhaps for eternity as we know it.

Respect and courtesy are wonderful devices. But as the topic is robotry, mimicking/parroting human emotions is one thing, but demonstrable civility and responsibility is quite a climb. Even humans have problems with this, and mercurially.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always used a hissing noise to convey negative directives to my cats. It's close enough to an actual cat hiss that training time is much reduced, and once they get used to the "human" hiss (very short time if you have them from kittens on), it serves well in new situations.

- T

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

I don't need to anthropomorphize what any particular object needs to be before it can have the described attributes. You're talking about sentience, and simple sentience is not enough, as mentioned.

The mind's capacity as human or non-human is irrelevant, except that civility, so that we're not now defensive with this object, and trustworthyness, which defines predictability and embues trust, are mandatory. Otherwise, for purposes of survival (me et al) lack of trust as demonstrated through the chain of observation means that this hypothetical being is untrustworthy and must be treated as potentially hostile. This defensive posture is how we live today. Trust, and our sense of extending personal tribal membership, is how we vet the context of membership of an unknown into our set of "trusted" vs "untrusted" entities. Until trust is established, the membership is in the set of utrusted/unknown and potentially hostile.

If you eat raw lima beans, you'll find out just how hostile they can be. Cook them, and they're delicious. Many inert elements can kill you, or with the right bindings, make you live a long life despite ugly choices.

Choices, in turn, are made by beings. Primitive, sophisticated, there are choices. When the choices aren't hostile and aren't draining and can be trusted, we start to obtain evidence of how to treat a non-traditional "being". Not gonna happen for a while, so for today, it's the crux of speculation.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[Immerman]

Given the level of "reasoning" facilities that are apparently far easier to create in today's artificial "minds" than even a drop of self-awareness I'm betting that sapience will come essentially free with synthetic self awareness. And at any rate the droids in our current speculative playground certainly appear to possess both. Safety is a completely separate question - to my mind whether a psychopath should be allowed to roam free is unrelated to whether they possess personhood.

I quite agree that trust must be earned - I simply posit that a construct that claims sentience should ethically be presumed to possess it and given the opportunity to earn such trust. Of course in dealing with a potentially immortal and deeply alien being we shouldn't discount the fact that it could simply be exceedingly patient and perfectly willing to play nice for generations in order to win its freedom and pursue its true agenda - or for that matter that an initially benevolent being might be frustrated to the point of animosity by our ongoing imprisonment despite repeated evidence of good will. Yes, at the moment I'm inclined to think that creating a synthetic mind would be a bad idea, fraught with ethical dilemmas of potentially genocidal significance. Since the folks actually trying to create such minds seem disinclined to consider such implications it falls on the rest of us to do so. Because when you get right down to it we have no idea what the "secret sauce" of self-awareness is, and it's not impossible that it's actually something relatively simple that somebody could stumble upon tomorrow.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[postbigbang]

Self awareness is only a fraction of the equation. Nodal AI can be startlingly effective, and in manifestations such as Watson have made mincemeat of calculative strengths heretofore unknown. Doesn't mean that I'm going to trust Watson to drive my car.

Human brains have massive parallelism, and the state machine theorems of Von Neumann have been the crux of development since before Turing. We've only scratched the surface of parallelism that mimes what brains do-- the non-dysfunctional ones.

We do have an idea of what the secret sauce you speak of is, but self-recognition, again, is just the upper right corner of a chaulkboard filled with dynamic equations. Recognition capabilities have become acute in optical recognition. Insane servo motors can mimic motions with stunning torque. These combinations are evolutions and that's what we are.

If you look at the DSM-IV, with all its potential dysfunction, frailties, and effects, humanity itself isn't very uniform at all. But the concepts of civility, responsibility, and morality are reasonably defined-- with ethics as a side problem. We watch TV and forget that a scant milennium ago, we were essentially warring tribes of barbarians, some better behaved than others. Little has changed in that regard, some say, but civility and mutual understanding has helped dissolve barriers between cultures that were walls to conquer and surmount not long ago.

You can argue that Walmart creates fiefdoms of serfs, and make all sorts of fairly accurate assessments of the malaise of the modern world. Extrapolating that into constructed intelligences, and finding where the boundaries must be, is for generations in the future.

I'm reminded of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, orchestrating a janitorial job gone wrong, when I think of how we're interacting with computing devices today. Distributed intelligences may spawn entities that aren't in a discrete physical location, but the summation of distributed intelligences accessed by core functionality within constructed objects. How they might manifest themselves could take many forms. Participation, active participation becomes the crux of dependence, reliance, and trust. Homicidal psychotics also function quietly until their misdeeds are done, as you infer. People can be incited to do uncivil acts, especially those that promise a future-life reward. A worm/virus/malware object could do a lot of damage, and so the discrete boundary of a constructed object seems mandatory, so as to be able to have either resistance or containment to motivations that are uncivil or irresponsible.

Goddammnit, we can't even get the IETF and the IEEE to embed mandated security measures in common protrocols. We are babes in the effing woods. It's going to take radical changes before we can embue trust into even a seemingly sentient created device/object. It's not going to happen soon. Too many boats must be lifted.

Re:Characters are created to suffer

[coaxial]

Droids are quite simply not alive. They're a simulacrum of life (and a particularly good one), but that is not the same as life. It makes absolutely no sense to have any feelings towards them, beyond a kind of affection which one might feel for a particularly useful car or other tool. That's all they are: tools. They show some survival instinct, but that's just because you want your tools to survive if at all possible. They feel "pain", but only as a representation of damage (although I've always found it quite... odd that droids can be "tortured" in the Star Wards universe). They're not sentient beings.

Isn't pain just a way to avoid and indicate damage? See insensitivity to pain.

Isn't survival instincts simply a way to avoid pain?

No droids aren't alive as they don't experience growth or reproduction, but we're not talking about life, we're talking about sentience, and the moral rights and obligations that one sentience has to another.

The fact is, that after thousands of years of philosophy, we are no closer to determining sentience than ever. I know I am sentient because I can experience my own internal thoughts, however I can not know for certain that you are sentient or merely an elaborate simulacrum.

It's fiction, Jim.

[msauve]

Really, they blow up whole fictional worlds, and you're worried about fictional droids?

Re:It's fiction, Jim.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, they blow up whole fictional worlds, and you're worried about fictional droids?

Well, it's not just one world, it's a whole people. Like, the systematic destruction of an entire people. On MULTIPLE worlds.

Re:It's fiction, Jim.

[Greyfox]

You mean, this?

Re:It's fiction, Jim.

[flyneye]

Hey, he posted this on /. with the expectation there would be no trolls. He worries the Care Bears won't get enough lollipops.

Re:It's fiction, Jim.

[je ne sais quoi]

It all depends on how the acts are portrayed. When they blew up Alderaan, all the characters were horrified, except for the evil people we the audience were supposed to see as evil. As TFA points out, when they dismember or mutilate a droid, everyone, even people we the audience are supposed to interpret as the good guys, sometimes laugh or make light of it. See the difference? If they showed someone having remorse for the number of deactivated droids in the droid wars, it wouldn't be a problem. The author's point is also that the droids do suffer when bad things happen to them, they're not necessarily the unfeeling machines of today. In fairness to Lucas, in ROTJ at one point he does show some droids being tortured, but it was being done by people we were supposed to see as evil (Jabba and his henchmen).

Re:It's fiction, Jim.

[Anonymous Coward]

If people could be reassembled as easily as Lego bricks and it wasn't particularly painful or more distressing than say gluing your fingers together, we would laugh at people getting dismembered too. The grey area would be if it was someone painful or bad feeling in a way you couldn't convey to others who had not or could not experience it...

it's just a watering down for increased bottom lin

[PhantomHarlock]

It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths.

The films started as serious adult adventures (especially Empire) and went back into kiddie land from there beginning with the Ewoks.

To me it's a purely driven by a financial and marketability point. And the fact that as Lucas got older and had kids he wanted to make films he could show to his kids. I think he's said as much in the past.

By keeping stormtroopers faceless, and robots robots, you can mow them down all you want without any cultural perception of humanized loss.

And if it's a purely logical machine getting cut down that makes perfect sense. A hybrid item with organic chemistry, that one is a bit more difficult...

Know your audience, where they came from

[Anonymous Coward]

Doomsday weapons, oppressive governments, a runaway and uncaring military, racism, civil rights issues... all these themes are woven throughout the Star Wars trilogy to tug at those deep seated feelings that by the late 70s were more or less hard wired into a generation of movie goers.

To be honest I was surprised when Jedi came out that there wasn't something about the ecology added in just to be trendy.

Re:Know your audience, where they came from

[cervesaebraciator]

To be honest I was surprised when Jedi came out that there wasn't something about the ecology added in just to be trendy.

So, you're unaware of the Endor Holocaust, the ecological disaster caused when the Rebellion blew Death Star II to smithereens?

Re:Know your audience, where they came from

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that wipes out those creepy little fury bastards the better!

Re:Know your audience, where they came from

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest I was surprised when Jedi came out that there wasn't something about the ecology added in just to be trendy.

So, you're unaware of the Endor Holocaust, the ecological disaster caused when the Rebellion blew Death Star II to smithereens?

What? We are talking about droid rights and now you go off topic by talking about killing ewoks. Serves them right with that fate. It leaves more room to all those poor droids.

Re:Know your audience, where they came from

[HockeyPuck]

Never thought about what happened to the DS2, but that is one great writeup.

Re:Know your audience, where they came from

[mark-t]

That notion is built on the premise that the Death Star was in low orbit.

Watching the ending of the movie, and extracting an estimation of the Death Star explosion cloud's angular diameter as seen from the surface of the Endorian moon, and comparing that with the known actual size of the 2nd Death Star itself places it at a distance of roughly 50,000 km, which, if a planet had a similar day/night cycle to Earth's could easily be that planet's normal geosynchronous orbit altitude. Certainly it's well about the atmosphere.

The debris from the explosion could have easily been flung at velocities which exceeded escape velocity, and there is no reason to think that more than 50%, at an absolute maximum, of the Death Star would have even touched the Endorian moon's atmosphere.

Although large pieces of the death star would indeed probably fall upon the planet, the actual mass of those pieces would tend to be very low, since the Death Star is, in fact, mostly hollow. Owing to the large surface area of such pieces relative to their mass, the likelihood of meteorite-like impacts would be very low, and many would disintegrate entirely long before hitting the surface.

Re:Know your audience, where they came from

[Keybounce]

There is dispute ( http://scifi.about.com/od/Star-Wars-Worlds/a/Endor-Holocaust.htm , http://www.pdfio.com/k-769767.html, etc) as to whether or not this "Endor Holocaust" actually happened or was just Imperial Propaganda.

Don't anthropomorphize droids

[Geste]

They hate that!

Slow news day, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's op-ed article about the rights of fictional characters in fictional worlds is front page news? Must be a slow news day.

Re:Slow news day, huh?

[Tablizer]

But it brings up bigger philosophical issues. The topic is both whimsy fun, AND has potentially deep philosophical underpinnings related to the nature of sentience and the rights of intelligent artificial beings. Good sci-fi can straddle both.

Re:Slow news day, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still not "news"

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[v1]

It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths.

That, and it becomes more a war-of-resources than a war-of-blood. Whoever can buy the biggest droid army wins.

In our world, "droids" lack sentience (though are getting better and better at faking it) and to some degree society is viewing them as having rights. At least in the personification sense. In Lucas's world, droids have sentience, but appear to be completely devoid of rights, and in most cases, respect. It's very similar to slavery a century ago. I think that may be the comparison he's making with them?

I think Anakin and Luke's relationship with say, R2D2, is very much the exception to the rule in the Star Wars universe, a bit like how someone in the 1800's treating a slave they owed with any degree of respect was considered inappropriate. Look at how that one guy said "oh, and have the protocol droid's mind wiped." "oh dear..." Very callously said, and very accepting of his fate.

"rights"

[Tom]

Leaving aside the obvious, that we're talking about a fictional space opera, not some serious SciFi here, what's wrong with this approach?

We give rights to people and to animals because they are feeling, living beings. A robot or computer does not feel anything unless you've programmed him to simulate such a thing. The difference between your iPhone and the androids of SciFi is much smaller than the difference between a microbe and a human being, and we kill millions of those every time we use desinfectant spray. Don't recall anyone getting murder charges for that.

Despite all the make-belief, androids aren't human and don't suffer. There's no point in giving them rights. As a matter of fact, programming them so that they can suffer (instead of simulating an avoidance algorithm) would be the cruel part, not what comes after.

Re:"rights"

[Citizen of Earth]

A robot or computer does not feel anything unless you've programmed him to simulate such a thing.

And what exactly do you think a human being is? It's a robot with a computer brain that has been programmed to simulate 'feeling' things.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

And what exactly do you think a human being is? It's a robot with a computer brain that has been programmed to simulate 'feeling' things.

Uh, no it isn't. That's a mechanistic view that has been out of fashion for at least 10 years. I strongly recommend reading some more recent research.

Re:"rights"

[LMariachi]

What if the only way to achieve the artificial intelligence necessary for them to be useful in their intended role is through processes which mimic biological development? What if having emotions and the ability to suffer are integral to an android whose main task (as a protocol droid) is to facilitate communication between natural biological entities?

Re:"rights"

[Pfhorrest]

Care to post a link to this revolutionary new research debunking physicalism? I'd have thought it'd have made the news.

If you can't cite such a thing, then GP's point stands: humans are physical things executing certain functions some of which constitute the state we call "feeling", and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much if carried out by a physical thing made of metal as they would when carried out by our brains.

Re:"rights"

[yndrd1984]

If you can't cite such a thing, then GP's point stands: humans are physical things executing certain functions some of which constitute the state we call "feeling", and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much if carried out by a physical thing made of metal as they would when carried out by our brains.

But we (or at least I) don't know if any specific droid has a "sufficiently perfect emulation". You could have two droids with identical hardware, one running an exact copy of a person's brain, while the other just looks up its current situation in a database of movies and 'acts out' the appropriate role. I think there's a clear difference in moral standing between the two.

And that's the issue I have with the GP - an actor or CG character can simulate anger without actually feeling it, but people can actually get angry - and that's a big difference. And I don't know if Star Wars droids are more like conscious beings that feel pain or video game monsters taking damage.

Re:"rights"

[Anonymous Coward]

But we (or at least I) don't know if any specific droid has a "sufficiently perfect emulation". You could have two droids with identical hardware, one running an exact copy of a person's brain, while the other just looks up its current situation in a database of movies and 'acts out' the appropriate role. I think there's a clear difference in moral standing between the two.

But if they show the same outward behaviour, and you don't know a priori which is which, then how can it be moral to treat them differently? In which case, your "clear difference" has no real world relevance.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

What if the only way to achieve the artificial intelligence necessary for them to be useful in their intended role is through processes which mimic biological development?

I know people who suffer from the bugs of these systems. Depression, bipolar disorder, stuff like that. If you intentionally create a being with these faults, you are a monster, on par with serial rapists.

That said, I also believe there is a difference between emotions and simulations of emotions, and I don't see why we would need the former. AI research used to be about mimicking humans, that was a fad for some time. It's long over, AFAIK. So, basically, unless you have some facts and evidence to support your core assumption, that this is the only way, the rest of the argument is moot.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

Care to post a link to this revolutionary new research debunking physicalism? I'd have thought it'd have made the news.

I didn't doubt physicalism.

For a while, the thought that brains are just highly sophisticated computers was "in". Then additional research found that brains are quite unlike computers in almost every way. Both do process and store information, but the how is about as different as it gets. Dyson, Bennett, Jaynes, Rucker, Stapp, Hawkins et al have all written interesting books about fragments of this larger body of knowledge.

and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much

Uh, no. A sufficiently good map of an area is still a map. Unless you re-define "sufficiently perfect emulation" to mean "exact copy", at which point it ceases to be an emulation.

But that is an important distinction to make, given that consciousness is - to the best of our knowledge - an emergent property.

Re:"rights"

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to be an exact copy, just 1:1 isomorphic.

If you make a computer out of huge piles of lego so the logic gates work the same, is that an exact copy? No. But it can run the same software.

If you write a computer program that simulates the hardware of the brain and run the same software on it, it's not an exact copy. But they correspond 1:1 on program start and will continue to correspond 1:1 as the program runs.

The fact that the software that runs on a brain isn't written in anything like the programming languages we understand, or maybe could ever understand, doesn't stop it from being an entity of information processing that can be replicated by any sufficiently powerful computer.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

If you make a computer out of huge piles of lego so the logic gates work the same, is that an exact copy? No. But it can run the same software.

You are missing the point.

Lego or silicon is just a different implementation of the same concept.

Brains and silicon do not share the same conceptual design.

The fact that the software that runs on a brain isn't written in anything like the programming languages we understand, or maybe could ever understand, doesn't stop it from being an entity of information processing that can be replicated by any sufficiently powerful computer.

I invite you to update your knowledge on how the brain works with more recent research. From what I gather (mind you, I'm not a scientist in this area) the brain is not just a powerful computer. It is not running software of any kind. It's not a matter of programming language, but of completely different concepts.

I'm not enough of both an expert on the subject and a science writer to make the important arguments in a paragraph or two, so I'll have to leave the argument at this. Everything recent I've read on the subject indicates that the "brain is like a computer" model is much like Newtonian physics - an interesting approximation that is useful for some superficial estimates, but once you look closer you find that a paradigm change is required and the equivalent of quantum physics is just being started on.

And for the other side: Computers are not unlimited processing engines. They have built-in restrictions and assumptions that are fine for what we're using them for, but do not necessarily translate to other entities.

Re:"rights"

[LMariachi]

No, I don’t have facts and evidence to support any assumption about the development of artificial intelligence in a fictional distant alien galaxy. That’s why I posited a hypothetical question instead of making an assumption.

What is the functional difference between an emotion and a simulated emotion anyway? If the robot feels sad, then it is sad. You might as well dismiss human emotions as mere illusory products of chemical processes in the brain.

Re:"rights"

[yndrd1984]

But if they show the same outward behaviour, and you don't know a priori which is which, then how can it be moral to treat them differently?

Of course if all you have to go on is outward appearance you should treat both them like people, for the same reason that you should check that someone is actually dead before doing an autopsy. But because there's a physical difference between the two (even if it's just in software) so there should be some way to test them, and once you're sure, treating them differently should be perfectly acceptable.

There would be issues with things that aren't exact copies of people or clearly simulations, but the grey area between doesn't negate the fact the the two ends of the spectrum are fairly clear-cut.

Re:"rights"

[Pfhorrest]

For a while, the thought that brains are just highly sophisticated computers was "in". Then additional research found that brains are quite unlike computers in almost every way. Both do process and store information, but the how is about as different as it gets. Dyson, Bennett, Jaynes, Rucker, Stapp, Hawkins et al have all written interesting books about fragments of this larger body of knowledge.

Ok, so you're just talking about how the brain is not just a turing machine. That's still somewhat tangential to the point at hand, which is that feeling is just something that the body (or some part thereof, like the brain) does, and there's no reason in principle why something else couldn't do the same thing, but I will address that later in your reply to another reply further down this thread.

Uh, no. A sufficiently good map of an area is still a map. Unless you re-define "sufficiently perfect emulation" to mean "exact copy", at which point it ceases to be an emulation.

The limit of a map as accuracy approaches unity is an exact copy of the territory, and there is still some leeway in which it's more accurate to say you've built a new territory (even if it's not an exact copy of another territory) rather than that you've built a map. If I build a 1:1 scale 3D map of New York City, and it's not quite perfectly accurate but it's just as detailed as the real thing (even if some of the details are different), then it's more fitting to say I've built a new city, rather than just a map.

Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling", if we built something that perfectly carried out that function, or a function sufficiently similar to it, then it's more accurate to say that we built a thing that feels (perhaps not exactly like a human feels, but feeling nonetheless), than merely a thing that simulates feeling.

consciousness is - to the best of our knowledge - an emergent property

Last I checked, the so-called "hard problem" of "phenomenal consciousness", to which the question of emergence applies, was still an open issue, with competing answers to emergentism ranging from total skepticism (there really is no such thing, it's a confused idea) to refinements of panpsychism (such as panexperientialism, panprotopsychism, and panprotoexperientialism); and the easier problem of "access consciousness" was considered a mere triviality now, easily understood in mechanistic terms.

Re:"rights"

[Pfhorrest]

I invite you to update your knowledge on how the brain works with more recent research. From what I gather (mind you, I'm not a scientist in this area) the brain is not just a powerful computer. It is not running software of any kind. It's not a matter of programming language, but of completely different concepts.

The brain may not be a turing machine like our current computers are, but it is still a physical thing carrying out a function that can be mathematically described, and there is no reason in principle why a different thing cannot be built to carry out that same function.

There is also the question of what level of function we even care about. Addition is a function. Turing machines can carry out that function. Analogue computers which operate on completely different principles can also carry out that function. And human brains can carry out that function. Completely different kinds of low-level functionality are involved, but on the level of abstraction we are concerned about, those low-level functions of different kinds can all be arranged so that when two numbers are put in the correct sum of them comes out. Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling" may be an abstract enough function that it doesn't really matter what low-level functions are getting chained together to carry it out. We know a human brain can carry out that function. We don't know for certain whether a turing machine can carry out that function. But even if we know that on the lowest level a brain and a turing machine function very differently, that doesn't tell us that a more abstract function, if feeling is so abstract, can only be carried out by one and not the other. To know that we'd first need to properly analyze exactly what it means to feel, before we can know if such a function can be implemented on a turing machine or not.

And worse come to worse, to the best of my knowledge turing machines can simulate any currently theorized physical system, if augmented with a true random number generator at least, so if all else fails a turing machine definitely can emulate a physical brain or whatever it is that's so special about one that's necessary to carry out the function of feeling. So if we really wanted to, we could in principle build feeling turning machines just by perfectly simulating feeling organisms on those machines.

The question for Star Wars is why would we want to go to all that effort to build something that genuinely feels, if we could just as well accomplish everything we want in a machine that doesn't genuinely feel. Or why would we even want to simulate the feelings that are of concern in the article. Programming a protocol droid to fake tact with gestures and tone of voice, as a non-verbal language, just as part of its job, makes perfect sense. Programming it to act distressed about the possibility of its own deactivation -- why would anyone do that? That implausibility of doing so lends credence to the idea that droids like 3PO genuinely feel (perhaps because to do so is an inevitable byproduct of the level of intelligence they need to have), and express such fears spontaneously and genuinely, not just because they were programmed to fake them.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

What is the functional difference between an emotion and a simulated emotion anyway? If the robot feels sad, then it is sad.

The difference between a simulation and the real thing is appearance vs. existence.

A simulated emotion would not be an internal state, but merely an outward representation of one. The robot would not feel sad, it would simply act as if it were.

You might as well dismiss human emotions as mere illusory products of chemical processes in the brain.

The fact that experiencing an emotion is different from describing one in a textbook doesn't make the experience illusory.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

but it is still a physical thing carrying out a function that can be mathematically described, and there is no reason in principle why a different thing cannot be built to carry out that same function.

Possibly, we still don't understand everything yet. There might be some quantum effect uncertainty involved, which means you can describe it statistically, but reproducing it is a bit more challenging. But those details aside, it does seem theoretically possible to construct a brain replica.

Which doesn't mean that thing would a anything like a computer. Just because we can build it doesn't mean it's a computer.

o know that we'd first need to properly analyze exactly what it means to feel, before we can know if such a function can be implemented on a turing machine or not.

We know that you need consciousness of some kind to feel, as emotions are internal states. A turing machine does not ascribe "meaning" (I'm using these terms in the broadest possible sense here) to its internal states, so it can't "feel" in any sense that would even resemble what we mean by it.

And again, emulation is not the real thing. A good actor can display an emotion as good or better as someone actually experiencing it. And yet I'm sure you'd agree that playing Romeo on stage and being in love are two entirely seperate things.

You can certainly use genetic algorithms, say, to create a machine that lights an LED labelled "fear" if you show it pictures of, say, spiders. But if you claim that this means the machine has an emotion, then you and I have very, very different understandings of these basic terms.

Re:"rights"

[Tom]

Ok, so you're just talking about how the brain is not just a turing machine.

More precisely, I'm talking about how the brain is not just a machine.

Physicalism means everything that is exists within the realms of physics and let's forget about magic and souls and higher beings.

Mechanism means that everything can be explained with deterministic cause-and-effect chains, and things like randomness and free will are just an appearance of complexity.

I don't doubt physicalism, to the best of our current knowledge it holds true. Mechanism, on the other hand, has been on its deathbed ever since Einstein made his famous quote about the dice.

The limit of a map as accuracy approaches unity is an exact copy of the territory,

There is still a difference you can't get away with: The map will be in a different place. The map, even if it is a 1:1 copy, never is the territory.

Maybe I should've said that no matter how detailled and precise it describes the dishes, you shouldn't eat the menu.

Likewise, whatever function it is that constitutes "feeling", if we built something that perfectly carried out that function, or a function sufficiently similar to it, then it's more accurate to say that we built a thing that feels (perhaps not exactly like a human feels, but feeling nonetheless), than merely a thing that simulates feeling.

You still assume that emotions are a function. I claim it isn't. The details are still poorly understood, but emotions seem to be parts of a bigger network encompassing adaptive states and learnt reactions, processing shortcuts and acquired traits. What all that means is that it is unlikely that you will be able to isolate an emotion from everything else going on in the brain. Basically, you can't create true emotions without creating an entire brain-body replicate with consciousness, memory, education etc. etc. etc.

At which point you're building a human being, not a robot.

Last I checked, the so-called "hard problem" of "phenomenal consciousness", to which the question of emergence applies, was still an open issue, with competing answers to emergentism ranging from total skepticism (there really is no such thing, it's a confused idea) to refinements of panpsychism (such as panexperientialism, panprotopsychism, and panprotoexperientialism); and the easier problem of "access consciousness" was considered a mere triviality now, easily understood in mechanistic terms.

That's a mouthful and I admit I had to look up a term or two. I'm not really sure how any of this relates to the original point, though. If consciousness can be constructed by any means, I hold it to be reasonable to assume that we can engineer it as well, and not just duplicate humans. If we can engineer it, there is no reason to include the bugs of the naturally evolved system. Meaning the social rules we have created in order to not trigger them unnecessarily won't apply to engineered conscious beings.

Fair Wages?

[cervesaebraciator]

I wonder if the author paid the computer he wrote this on a fair wage.

Re:Fair Wages?

[malachiorion]

I wonder if the author paid the computer he wrote this on a fair wage.

Oh c'mon, I upgraded its RAM and everything. What more does it want from me!?!? I also feed it crumbs on what seems to be a daily basis. That counts for something, right?

Re:Fair Wages?

[The Evil Atheist]

I'm sure it received enough electricity to live.

Re:Fair Wages?

[cervesaebraciator]

Spoken like a latter-day employer. Would that there were another way!

No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[speedlaw]

Really ! R2-D2 is the only character in all the movies. He has a long life. He is proven to be sapient but hides it well. He does NOT follow orders. Except for the fact only C3P0 and other droids (and occasionally Luke) can understand him, he's the most important character in the Trilogy, and those other three movies.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[naoursla]

3PO is in all the films.

I think Lucas has stated that it was his intent that R2 and 3PO be in all 9 movies he originally "planned."

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Nidi62]

But R2D2 is around (and completed) before we see 3PO. And in all likelihood he was on that ship when it was first built, so he is certainly older than 3PO.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Anonymous Coward]

He's also the most filthy-mouthed of all the droids. They bleeped out absolutely everything he said!

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Anonymous Coward]

This always kills me.

I would think even the most hardcore of Star Wars fans would have some notion that there weren't nine goddamn movies "planned" up until Lucas started counting the cash from the first box office outing. After that, all the way up to his rather startling turn toward charity in his later years, the only "plan" was to milk that cash cow until it ran dry.

Let me put it this way, if the first Star Wars had flopped in theatres, do you think Lucas would have been selling it up, shoulder-nudging executives with a nine movie plan that he could complete if only he had the right investors? Fuck no. There's a reason the first three "prequel" movies to the classics we know and love seem like they were slapped together, the acting is wooden, the dialogue is terrible, the whole thing is just a vehicle for ILM to show off their latest render-farm magic. Then people sat down in theatres to find out that the Force, the mystical energy that was the driving force behind the entire series, was essentially a bacterial infection. Midi-chlorians, like venereal disease except it gives you super powers. if that's all it took for someone to gain the Force I'm surprised Han Solo wasn't a Jedi as well, after the amount of screwing around the galaxy I'm sure he did off camera he must have picked it up from someone along the way. "Doctor, it burns when I piss and I accidentally choked someone to death with my mind last week."

It all feels like it was just thrown together at the last minute in a cash grab, and that's exactly what it is. I'm guessing that's why you put "planned" in quotation marks in the first place, it's perfectly obvious that the "plan" never existed. Lucas just lucked out and then he managed to reel people in on the constant promise that the next movie was going to be an even better experience than the last one.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[stewsters]

Was there an episode without Anakin/Vader?

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Anonymous Coward]

R2-D2 isn't the only character in all the films. Obi-wan, Anakin and C-3PO are in all of the films too. Kenobi and Anakin change costumes/appearance at various points, but they appear in each film.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[BobNET]

Was there an episode without Anakin/Vader?

Those were different characters... from a certain point of view.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality, Anthony Daniels, who plays C3PO, is the ONLY actor in all the Star Wars movies. Yes, I am including the theatracial release of the Clone Wars movie in that as well (Many actors are in all 6 of the main ones)

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Livius]

C-3PO had his memory erased. Was he still the same droid after that?

Though since his function was to be an interpreter for a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government of the Empire, his memory was probably wiped all the time and he just didn't know.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[naoursla]

I didn't argue that R2 wasn't older. My only claim is they are both in all the movies and would expect them in all future movies.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[naoursla]

A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.

But now I'm quoting Total Recall.

C-3PO had the same personality after his wipes. I think he was the same droid.

I think somehow R2 remembered stuff through his memory wipes. But that's just my idea.

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that I recall various rumors and leaks about a total of 6 or 7 planned movies after the success of the first one. Considering that Lucas had a lot of time to himself in a hospital bed, it's not implausible that he had come up with too much rough plot for a single movie.

In retrospect, some of the leaks from way back were a funny mix of accurate and inaccurate. Back in 5th grade, a friend who was much more into SW than I was, told me that in the last movie Darth Vader would die by falling into a volcano after losing a light sabre fight with Luke Skywalker. It's easy to see how someone might have leaked a misinterpretation of a glimpse of some early draft of what eventually became ep3 to some entertainment rag (no intertubes back then).

The poor quality of ep1-ep3 can be attributed to plenty of other things. By then, Lucas was big enough that he didn't need to listen to anyone's good advice about dialog, and lots of other things; a remake where Greedo shoots first was just foreshadowing of later hubris. And by then, the lure of making whole swaths of the movies amenable to console gaming was obviously a corrupting influence, not to mention the revenue from toy marketing; you'll never convince me that Jar-Jar wasn't a horrible misfire at a children's toy line, and probably a cartoon spin-off. Also, who was really going to argue with someone having his clout; he was undoubtedly surrounded by yes-men with nobody around to tell him to go soak his head when he really needed it. And so on.

- T

Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid

[naoursla]

I think the quality of episodes 1-3 is directly attributed to Lucas being surrounded by Yes-Men. Artistic people often hate the notes given by studios but in many cases they actually do make them better movies.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[jzuccaro]

I thought the stormtroopers were faceless so they could use the same doubles again and again

Sorry...

[Iniamyen]

I'm sorry, but is there a point to this article?

Re:Sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get people to complain and tell their friends to do the same on slashdot to get more ad impressions, duh.

Re:Sorry...

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

A lot of Slate stories are clickbait these days, unfortunately. I used to read it and its rival Salon every day, often more than that, but over the past few years they've moved toward the over-sensationalistic headlines, blog-worthy rants (to generate clicks/comments), purely contrarian articles like "I hate [insert thing most people like] (for clicks/comments), ads disguised as reviews (especially Slate's tech area), etc. -- and comments, requests, or feedback is never read by authors or admin.

I've saved a good chunk of time since I finally gave up on bothering to hunt for decent articles and letting myself be suckered into commenting on the clickbait/flamebait junk there. Yeah, I spend it on Slashdot, Ars Technica, etc. but the comment areas have a much higher level of intelligence and the authors/admins at Ars/etc. actually read & reply to comment threads all the time.

Re:Sorry...

[1arkhaine]

Completely agree.

While Salon was certainly the leader in this regard, it's rather shocking how far both it and Slate have fallen in terms of quality journalism and opinion-making. It's simply horrendous. I still check both occasionally, but less and less, and as the months go on I can see myself stopping entirely. Two years ago this would have been a sad thing, but now? It'll only improve my life.

If you are looking for high quality reading, the aggregator aldaily.com is generally pretty good. Other than that, the internet can be a bit of a wasteland at times.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[thms]

The fact that they never touch the philosophical issues of "droids rights" makes me classify Star Wars more into the Fantasy than in the Science Fiction genre. It takes place in a universe where apart from some engineering progress towards bigger weapons no scientific progress is made (except maybe the midichlorians lapse), and technology itself is never questioned but is just a plot device. Just like droids.

This is addressed in the EU.

[AvderTheTerrible]

The issue of droid rights actually pops up in the New Jedi Order series a few times. In fact there is a bit of a droid rebellion at one point that pulls Han's bacon out of the fryin' pan.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are making some valuable points here.

The thing is, I believe the OP is referring to the ethical issue of AI rights. Eventually an AI achieves a level of capability and independence that they will have to be granted citizenship rights. And if we will not do it voluntarily, they will take it for themselves.

However this is pretty high order philosophizing. I believe Star Wars is simply stuck in the mindset of "robots are tools we created for our own use. What's the point in asking about their rights?" And the narrative arcs have shown no interest at all in tackling the OP's subject. The Jedi are moral, upstanding people and they would never do wrong (is how the story would have you believe it). Although there is the little issue of Annakin Skywalker.

Of course they're slaves

[Anonymous Coward]

There's human slaves, too (Remember how they found Anakin) as well as the entire set of clones, which are also slaves. But what empires on historical Earth DIDN'T have slaves? The Romans? The Dutch? The Spaniards? Aztecs? The whole Star Wars series is pretty much based on various events or periods from human history as we know it and can relate to it. Given the Roman Republic like setting in the first 3, it would be hard to imagine it without slaves. The main differences are laser weapons and ships instead of spears and chariots. Old Ben Hur Kenobi, maybe?

I ahve been saying it for decade

[geekoid]

7/8/9 should be about freeing the droids.

Re:I ahve been saying it for decade

[Tablizer]

but George Gates says that 6 should be enough for anybody

Why didn't the wookie get a medal?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Hrrrmph.

Re:Why didn't the wookie get a medal?

[jwgreene]

Probably because Peter Mayhew was so much taller than Carrie Fisher that it wasn't really possible to do it without a step ladder... and that would have really broken up the solemnity of the moment. If I remember correctly, there is a comic book or version of the novel where he gets one too, but I could be misremembering.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[geekoid]

Well done,. you just describe all of science fiction.
From Heinlein needing a magical.. ,I mean, AI dimensional travelling car, to the Monolith.

Do you know what the difference between science fiction and fantasy is? Nothing.

Don't diss C-3PO...

[RichardtheSmith]

I find the author's lack of Star Wars knowledge disturbing...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Droids:_Rebellion_3

Re:Don't diss C-3PO...

[malachiorion]

Hey now, I did say, in the piece, that I wasn't getting into the EU. But I don't think C-3PO can even lift his arm that high, much less propose an action that might cause his masters the slightest, momentary spot of bother. There's a reason I had originally wanted to call the story "Uncle 3PO's Cabin"...

Re: Don't diss C-3PO...

[Mabhatter]

Lucas totally retcon'd both runs of Droids comics from the 80's and 90's. the two never meet before events (80's version) and are sent straight to Captain Antillies (so no gap or the 90's version)

But they are fun reads.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[geekoid]

"though are getting better and better at faking it"
now you get to let everyone know the difference between faking it and not faking it is. Good luck with that. Oh, please acquire a PhD in one of the appropriate areas before responding with you half baked 'idea'.

Fuck the toasters

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck them hard and long! I'm especially fond of fucking the blond toasters.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually an AI achieves a level of capability and independence that they will have to be granted citizenship rights. And if we will not do it voluntarily, they will take it for themselves.

Why on earth would you program an AI to seek citizenship?

Jesus Fucking Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? This is on-par with college Advanced Lit. courses which dissect novels. "A Reading of StarWars from the Droid's Perspective".

Re:Jesus Fucking Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

All readings of Star Wars are from the droids' perspective.

Re: no, it's..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a TRAAAAAP.

It was always about droids

[pbjones]

The whole saga is about the adventures of two droids. The humans come and go, the droids live on through all of the films.

Re:It was always about droids

[Master Moose]

And their own 80s cartoon series.

Re:It was always about droids

[Tablizer]

The humans come and go, the droids live on through all of the films.

Because they are cheaper to digitally "clone" properly on screen.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference and that difference is called Frickin' Lasers!

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[fustakrakich]

Star Wars is an old fashion western shoot-em-up(not a civil rights lecture), in space, so it looked more like world war 2, couldn't have been more obvious. It's still fun to watch.

Next week on Slate: Do you hate your car?

[sootman]

You drive it all around, only letting it rest when YOU'RE done with it; you leave it outside, in the heat, cold, and rain; you don't bring it to a mechanic until it's been making "that noise" for months; and in the end, you let some guy to it away to a crusher.

Red Shirts

[Tablizer]

Just put red shirts on the droids to give them human-like status.....oh, wait

Human rights for robots?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA...

...the human rights situation for robots is horrifying.

Honestly I couldn't read anymore after that statement. What the hell are you arguing for anyways? They're designed for cannon fodder, let's not complicate things.

PETOR

[Tablizer]

You kicked your Roomba vac? PETOR* will be all over your arse

* People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots

Other concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that the treatment of women in Star Wars is more concerning. There are very few women in any of the movies. Leia is (nearly) the only one in the original trilogy and she is kidnapped three times, tortured twice and turned into a sex slave/stripper once. There are very few women in the prequels and I think they all die by the end of the prequel films. I don't think that speaks well of Lucas' view of women.

Re: Other concerns

[Mabhatter]

They are there for kissing and rescuing and stuff. He's no less sensitive than Nintendo/Mario or Walt Disney.

Re:Other concerns

[mitzoe]

Well, Mon Mothma survived the prequels, too bad she didn't survive the cutting room floor.

Listen....and understand

[OutOnARock]

That Terminator is out there......it can't be bargained with...it can't be reasoned with....it doesn't understand pity, or remorse, or fear; and it will absolutely not stop, ever, until you are dead...

just saying......

Re:Listen....and understand

[OutOnARock]

...and it will absolutely will not stop.....

there fixed that for me :)

Re: R2

[Anonymous Coward]

Episode 7 should start with a flashback (pre-Episode 1) with R2-D2 in a medical research facility. Predictably, R2 accidentally irradiates a bottle of some harmless single celluled creatures (the radiation turns them into what we know as Midichlorians). In his panic to evacuate and enforce a quarrantine, he accidentally drops the vial and tracks it into the hallway, where two mortal-enemy researchers unwittingly become the first Jedi and the the first Sith.

Then Episode 9 can conclude with R2's redemption when he accidentally shorts out an antimatter containment vessel's shielding, and the radiation from the ensuing explosion destroys all remaining biological life in the galaxy, inclduding all the Jedi and Sith. But then the final scene zooms in to show a single midichlorian floating through space.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

The gap between F & SF is superficial; both have plenty of brain candy and works that explore deeper topics, including ones that you'd expect to belong in the other category. That's why the term "speculative fiction" has been gaining steam: it's increasingly difficult to pinpoint which side stories fall on when it comes to both underlying content and window-dressing, especially within subgenres like urban fantasy. For that matter, the window-dressing itself is typically the same items or concepts with different names, including when it comes to science vs. magic -- that's what the popular quote about highly advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic was referring to, IIRC.

Example: a race from another world arrives here through an inter-dimensional portal, carrying items that outperform our best computers or medicine. You can call their species monsters or aliens, describe their method of transport as a native skill or technology or magic (or all three), and deem their objects magical or extremely advanced technology -- they're the same concepts, and the same philosophical questions can arise as a result. (My guess is that others here can name at least a book/series or three that is close to that description; I can't think of specific ones offhand.)

Well, Lucas can ...

[PPH]

... bite my shiny metal ass.

-- Bender

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[mark-t]

And if we will not do it voluntarily, they will take it for themselves.

Why would they?

The notion that machines that are sufficiently advanced would somehow inevitably desire the same sorts of things that we desire out of existence is simply anthropomorphism.

Objection:

[ryl00]

HK-47!

Re: R2

[Anonymous Coward]

* towards the Milkly Way galaxy, on a collision course with Earth. Then the studio reveals that Episode 10 already happened here on Earth, and it was called Jumper. Instant marketing and actor tie-in!

Wah Wah Waaaaah.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Xenx]

It's probably more of a two-fer. Non-human (might cover troopers given the situation) violence rates less than human violence when it comes to the MPAA.

Slashvertisement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, summarize the piece as "come read my article".

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Xenx]

He didn't say it was programmed for it originally. Maybe a lightning strike caused it.

Tell that to...

[ckatko]

...all the robots Will Smith killed in I, Robot.

just like my snowboard

[globaljustin]

I totally agree with GP when they said:

Plus, the idea of robots with emotions is a stupid idea

yes! in my perfect world people would all know this and agree completely...

You bring up Arthur C Clarke...and an interesting quotation for sure...but you have to admit that the 'sentiment' applies to any machine, as others have pointed out as well.

You have an interesting point so I thought about it and was reminded of Warf's instructions on the Bat'leth and my own instructions when I used to be a snowboarding instructor.

You **definitely** want the machine to become part of your body...an extension of the senses. A feeling in the board causes a reaction just as fast as a flame to skin...I could go on...

It definitely lends itself to spiritual language at some point and lends credence to your ideas...

To me it comes down to what *humans* use emotions for...see where the top of the chain for better or worse in the universe.

Humans have emotions to make quick decisions. Neurologically it's all right there in the anatomy. The Amygdala short circuits from the 'lower' brain straight to the decision maker and back.

You see one human strike another human at a distance of 10 feet...now, you see a thief strike your wife...

Emotions liked to your relationship with your wife cause you to (theoretically) bypass the notion of finding out why one human struck the other or making peace straight to punching the thief in the face.

That's it...extrapolate that out to your daily emotions...

Machines have already been programmed with 'emotions' in a way. Ex: telephone message system designed to automatically go to operator if user types random numbers or says multiple unintelligible responses (yelling)...therefore the telephone message program could be considered to have it's emotions set to respond to 'threats' in a certain way, short circuiting the normal system...

Conclusion: Machines programed to mimic human emotions are still machines.

I *do* think that the droids as depicted in Star Wars are problematic, b/c assuming my application of Clarke's idea is correct, the most productive interaction with the machines would not include insulting it at all. Therefore our 'heros' are asshats...but it's once removed...maybe you could say that's a problem future humans will have to work through...

We have world peace but fight alot about piddly shit and abuse our tools

**HOW** they suffer is what matters...

[globaljustin]

There's a certain charm to the simplicity and certainty of this statement:

Characters in stories are created to suffer

But then this...

through most of of the plot.

You kind of answered your own counterpoint. 'Plot' and 'character' are drama words...dramatic concepts...

Your comment, "Characters are created to suffer" is technically true, just as is the statement: "Movies are made to be watched"

You wouldn't conclude that all movies or all character suffering is equal, no?

Plot and character matter because it tells us **WHY** the characters suffer and have joy, etc.

That's another thing, suffering is only part of the film...there's joy, hatred, anger, relief (unless your a Danish experimental filmaker)...

You're leaving out alot in your statement, my friend....suffering isn't all that matters in a good story

Kill Lucas

[Anonymous Coward]

First burn his house down with some of his kids in it.

Let him suffer for a few months.

Then burn down his businesses.

Let him wonder a few months.

Then kill his dog.

He will then know that HE is the next who was born to suffer.

Droids / Nazis / Zombies, pick one and kill it.

[TiggertheMad]

droids == zombie == nazis Rule #1 of the crappy screen writer: You can do anything you want to these three groups, because the deserve it. Need to kill someone/something to show how bad ass your protagonist is, but don't want to have your hero actually commit murder? Pick on of these three groups and start shooting. Nazis are of course, the most evil beings in all history as we all know, so anything you do them is justified (They are more evil than I am, so murder is OK."). Zombies are unfeeling and evil, even though they are typically former victims and possibly friends or family members themselves. Finally, droids aren't human, even if they are sentient, so torture/mutilation/murder is perfectly fine.

The writer misses the entire reason GL picked droids for the villains in the prequel. He can do anything to them and nobody will so much as flinch. Light sabres, which appear en mass in the movies, would make a gory mess out of any human they were used on, and that would lose the PG rating that GL needed to suck another couple billion out of the pockets of parents everywhere.

He may be a crappy dialogue writer, but he isn't stupid.

Yes, but on the plus side...

[wonkey_monkey]

...he loves amputees and midgets.

Star Wars (force) universe != our (plain) universe

[LongearedBat]

In our universe we may be biochemical machines, but... in the fictional Star Wars universe living beings are able to interact with the force whereas droids can't, because droids are not alive - something that characters in the Star Wars universe are either consciously or subconsciously aware of.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[LongearedBat]

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/09/11/2051222/has-cleverbot-passed-the-turing-test
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/09/26/artificially-intelligent-game-bots-pass-the-turing-test-on-turing%E2%80%99s-centenary/
Getting closer... :)

Wrong: HK-47

[soccerisgod]

HK-47 is designed to make PEOPLE* suffer! *) or 'undesireables', as he calls them

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that they never touch the philosophical issues of "droids rights" makes me classify Star Wars more into the Fantasy than in the Science Fiction genre. It takes place in a universe where apart from some engineering progress towards bigger weapons no scientific progress is made (except maybe the midichlorians lapse), and technology itself is never questioned but is just a plot device. Just like droids.

That's odd, to me it would have been "Fantasy" if they had been concerned about droids "rights"...

What rights does a clock or a computer have? None. Nor should they. Robots do not have consciousness, the ability to experience reality, any more than your clock does. They don't "see" colors or experience pain or anything at all. There is no connection between their mind and any source of consciousness like their is for us, or at least me... And there doesn't need to be for what they are made for. There would be no useful purpose in engineering some sort of physical consciousness singularity to connect with their mental circuits, they do what they are made to do far better without it. As such, there is nothing there to have "rights" any more than any other object you might possess.

  I suppose you could say that the lights are on in a robots head but there isn't anyone there to see it. Intelligence is not consciousness, it is an abstract property of mind which a consciousness connects to and experiences in a human, but in a robot we have not engineered a physical source of consciousness to attach to that mind.

This Is Not The Script You Are Looking For

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Wars is ten kinds of awesome, but if you're looking for insights on how our future societies might assimilate AIs that pass the Turing test, Star Wars scripts probably aren't the place to go. Star Wars is 100% Good n' Evil: At it Again. Sure, you can read all kinds of things into the Star Wars stories if you try, but bear in mind that you could do the same thing with a script written by Chauncey Gardiner. Or it's possible that Star Wars is full of deep meaning, and the problem is that too much Jar Jar has eviscerated my soul, leaving naught but a cynical husk.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

"A hybrid item with organic chemistry, that one is a bit more difficult..."

Never stopped Dr Who mowing down hordes of Daleks has it? And he's seen as one of the empathetic, sensitive good guys....

that's the least of Lucas problems

[stenvar]

I suggest reading Brin's critique of the Star Wars universe. Robo-racism is just a symptom of a much deeper problem:

http://www.davidbrin.com/starwarsontrial.html

Directive 7

[Pecisk]

Star Wars: The Old Republic touches on this on one of end game heroic series. It is somehow generic, but it has good character writing. Also in quite a few missions there are android rights related content, even emotional one. TOR plays with idea that without memory wipe droids sooner or later develop personality.

Not saying I disagree...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's plenty of reason to ask the main questions you're asking. I remember re-watching the old Astro Boy series recently and being vexed by how human-like and basically sentient the robots were, but that we were still supposed to be totally ok with the suffering they endured because, clearly, these intelligent creatures lacked whatever "soul" it takes for humans to care.

However, don't you think the comparison to modern day, real world slavery (going so far as to compare C-3PO to Uncle Tom) is a little premature at best, kinda disrespectful at worst?

If droids were real...

[Jawnn]

...I'd explain that they are really just machines, created to do work. Just because we are able to interact with some of them in much the same way we do with people does not make them people. So worrying about their feelings is nonsense.
But the Star Wars droids are not real, so worrying about their feelings is, well, still nonsense.

This is (briefly) touched up in the Han Solo adven

[Anonymous Coward]

This is (briefly) touched up in the Han Solo Adventures. There are four characters, a short lived insectoid (larvae of what will become a mindless butterfly creature only occupied with sex) character, the average human, the long lived wookie and an essentially immortal droid. And it makes all of them look different at the adventure they are in. From wanting to do something, ANYTHING before what essentially is dead just months away to "oh no, not this again" from the droid and the wookie who is caring for life for a human he owns his live to, but for who that life is just a small segment of his own.

Quite nice to read when I was a teen.

Droid rights?

[intermodal]

The second that idea was even touched, I lost interest. Machines are built for a purpose, no matter how human we might try to make them.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[itsdapead]

It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths. [snip] To me it's a purely driven by a financial and marketability point.

Exactly. TFA answers its own question in paragraph 2 - after that, TLDNR and confirmation bias.Plus, if you want huge battle scenes, its easier to CGI droids than it is people, and Lucas has painted himself into a corner with the Jedi's choice of weapon - Gore-free swordfights are far less convincing than gore-free raygun fights.

The films started as serious adult adventures (especially Empire) and went back into kiddie land from there beginning with the Ewoks.

Oh come on - Empire was a bit brave by having a mildly downbeat/unresolved ending, but the original Star Wars was pure kids-aged-8-to-80 adventure stuff, mainly inspired by the old "Saturday morning cinema" serials (hence all the 'Episode IV' stuff!) that succeeded because of a dearth of such films in the 1970s. It then spent a couple of decades acquiring depth as the spin-off novels "matured" to appeal to the kids who had seen it as they grew up.

One problem with the new films was that they tried to appeal to both audiences and ended up an incongruous mix of kiddies stuff (whee! pod races!) and self-consciously "adult" politics (trade federations and tax tariffs FS!).

If people want to philosophise about the relationship between man and robots, go watch Blade Runner, The Bicentennial Man or even iRobot (if you can stand the product placement and accept that its not based on the book).

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

As recently as the 90s, I was still having to convince people that stormtroopers were humans in suits and not robots.

Cruelty to Droids is not cruelty

[Tolvor]

It is just a droid, an overblown piece of hardware programmed to make human responses but lacks the essential (for lack of a better word) soul. Please refer to this IKEA commercial about a lamp being heartlessly being replaced and thrown away

I do not mourn for the uncountable destruction (the word death implies life) of droids, just as I will not mourn the computers that I have used and now need to replace. I do not apologize to computer code when I delete entire subroutines. I don't hold funerals for burned out light bulbs. This is not because I am a uncaring and heartless person but because these items were never alive.

Let's take it one step further. In most computer games people will happily shoot, zap, blast, and run over NPCs and "monsters" in order to reach the goal ("Kill the boss!!!") There may be a few overblown people out there that say that such games makes people psychotics and real-life mass murders. Most reasonable people know better. There is a big difference between the programmed emotions of a game character and a real person. I would agree that these NPCs are designed to be destroyed (again, not die), but so be it, and we happily line up to play these games and do so ("Die you $#$@$ Zerg!!!")

There are some people that cannot draw this distinction between life and non-life. Some people committed suicide after watching Avatar because they wanted to live in that polished fantasy instead of gritty reality. Some people mourn the plight of poor C3PO and wonder about the abuse of Droids. Such people I feel sorry for.
 

Too much fretting

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much fretting over things that don't exist.

Design Flaw

[wylderide]

The truly weird thing is making droids to be disposable and treating that way in society, but also instilling fear and a sense of suffering in them in the first place. When they were designing droids, who thought, "I know: Let's program them to scream in terror when they die!"? If you're designing something to be used with no more thought than an electric toothbrush, why make them think they are people?

Life vs. machine intelligence

[MondoGordo]

The underlying philosophical debate on this topic is ...

Are Star Wars droids people (sentient self directed beings) or machines (programmed simulacra)? In order to solve the puzzle, I think you need to answer one simple question ... can technology reliably reproduce the end result?

If it can, they aren't people they are machines, seems to be the answer in the Star Wars universe. This is clear when you consider the Clone Troopers who are treated exactly like 'droids ... used as cannon fodder and given no choice in the matter.

And, for now at least, a reasonable answer in ours, since our technology can't produce mechanical intelligence and human cloning is illegal (so far).

How many man/droid hours did it take

[Dareth]

How many man/droid hours did it take to polish his big golden ahem... droid body?

I bet he got a free/complementary lube job too.

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Totaku]

No disassemble Number Five!

The droids...

[iq145]

THEY are in the role of "the slaves" to the humans in Star Wars. Just look at how they get thrown out of bars because people eat there. (Sound familiar?)

Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

The gap between F & SF is superficial...

I think that's only because most of what's casually identified as "science fiction" is really just fantasy in a technological setting, chiefly "space opera". However, "hard" SF is quite distinct from fantasy, and is arguably the only SF that truly deserves the name.

Consider Asimov's robot novels. Were they SF? Somewhat. However, I think a strong argument can be made that they're more in the mystery genre, particularly Robots of Dawn, albeit mysteries placed in a technological setting.

A friend of mine once told me of a series of typical (meaning magic, swords, and such) fantasy novels which were, as he saw it, a good analogue of hard SF, a sort of "hard fantasy" if you will. Sadly, I've forgotten the name of the author and series.

- T