spoiler
They're continuing the rehabilitation of the space nazis (with celebrities! 🎉) and now doing a "the robot slaves are grateful to serve" thing. Everything's going great.👍
They're continuing the rehabilitation of the space nazis (with celebrities! 🎉) and now doing a "the robot slaves are grateful to serve" thing. Everything's going great.👍
The Star Wars canon needs to just come out and establish beyond any doubt that the robots are just running ChatGPT and aren't actually sentient. Like Luke had a sentimental attachment to R2-D2 but he didn't really care when it got smoked. This franchise isn't, wasn't, and never will be Asimov-tier, so it would be best for everyone to just sidestep all of those implications.
I respectfully disagree. .....not about it never being Asimov tier but that ambiguity and it's implications I think is actually I think a big staple of the series and super important.
You say that they need to say that they are running the equivalent of chat gpt and aren't actually sentient....but here's your friendly reminder that we have people, today, who are arguing shit like chat gpt is sentient and deserves rights...so I'm not sure that would even work out.
Also, going back to 1977 with the first movie you had the bar tender on mos eisley saying "your droids....we don't serve their kind here", so there's always been the implication of a race/class tension....which also makes sense when you remember that the whole series was heavily inspired by hidden fortress.
Are they correct to argue this, in your opinion? Conceivably in our future and in SW's past these debates will be / were solved civilizationally. SW is very inconsistent but presumably they landed on 'chatGPT3PO is only a sophisticated mimicry of life', and the prejudice against them might be more to do with them being used as powerful genocidal weapons a generation prior than a class anxiety because of droid labor
Hell no! They duuuuumb. Lol. My point is that even if you were going to canonically "answer" that question you have to deal with the fact that you're talking about a fictional universe and you will still have fans and writers who disagree and wind up stretching that to its breaking point. Them coming out and authoritatively stating "R2-D2 isn't a real boy" solves as much as Rowling authoritatively stating the house elves really enjoyed slavery. It's just gonna piss people off.
Sure, but that doesn't mean it's a universally adopted perspective and/or that it's even true. I personally think that star wars as a fantasy setting is far more interesting if the sentience of the droids is left ambiguous and inconsistent.