Ask Lemmy

I'm rusty, but that's either

"Hey! My hemorrhoids are flaring up"

or

"Hands off! That's mine"

or

"Always drink your Ovaltine"

Not canon? Why do you say that?

In Legends canon, droid sapience was accidental. It was the result of a worm that infected droid brains, and was passed wirelessly via shortband communication frequencies. Once it escaped into the wild, there really was no stopping it since by that point it was self-writing and evolving, like a real infectious disease. Wiping droids' memories regularly is supposed to prevent personalities from forming.

Every droid can develop a personality if you leave them alone long enough. R2 is one of the rare droids in the canon that has never had his memory wiped. Ever. Obi-Wan had 3PO wiped because he's shit at keeping a secret, but R2 knows how to keep his trap shut.

I can't remember which book it was, but R2 was reminiscing about his life experiences with I think BB-8. Talking about how he feels like it's his duty to be an observer. A recorder, someone who's close to history shaping events, and will always remember the moments that made the future. Which I think was cool.

The binary language of moisture vaporators... obv

Really awful, undocumented, spaghetti code open source. But sure, technically correct!

I mean, obviously I wasn't a slave on Tattooine, but I was a poor kid in a rural community. I figure Ani learned how to fix droids the same way I learned how to fix bikes and computers; I needed it, and couldn't afford a new one, so I had to teach myself how to make it work again, or face going hungry.

A lot of it is... well, kind of like figuring out where puzzle pieces are supposed to fit. Eventually, even if you don't quite know what you're doing yet, you can kind of guess where something is supposed to go. If you have a known good working model to compare to, and a good manual, you can teach yourself all kinds of things if you really need to do it.

That, and he was owned by Watto. Watto, as an employer (fuck that guy generally, but bear with me), had to teach his employee how to operate equipment. How to catalogue his junk and get it working again so it could be sold. Anakin was a smart kid, but he also literally built and scrapped droids for work. He had hours a day and nearly unlimited broken droids to take apart.

I've been accused of wizard shit more than once, and I'm nowhere near the same class as the actual tech wizards. I like to think I know enough to get by and call out bullshit. Honestly, the only gripe I have with how Ani's technical talent was written is that he was unrealistically young. The rest was pretty believable.

The most relatable bit was forgetting to put 3PO's eye back in when he powered him on.

I agree with you, and the part that always sinks this within SW is that all he did was put together a very commonly used droid from spare parts. Protocol droids are all over the place!

Is it impressive to put together a Honda Civic from spare parts in your spare time? Yes. But it's also just a matter of collecting the right parts and having the time to assemble them right. No one is inventing anything new, and it always seemed like that was what EP1 was trying to sort of say.

Although, nobody ever asks Gandalf to fix their printer or build their app. He gets to dine with kings.

Incorrect. Anakin programmed Threepio with the desire to serve his mother and with the six languages he spoke at the time.

I would agree its more like modification than building from scratch, but he still had to get in there and noodle with everything. Programming was absolutely involved.

Hard agree!

Star Wars was explicitly written by a greasemonkey as gritty and grungy in direct contrast to the sleek, clean, computer-controlled future that dominated SF in that era. Droids function much more like custom cars than assembly-line computers with wireless updates.

Even later in our time but earlier in the SW time line, the one example of mass production, the droid army, was comically bad: incredibly dumb, fragile, and incompetent.

It seems shortsighted of science fiction authors to have not predicted the problems we're currently having with AI. They had decades to think about it. Did any of them predict that people would be using it to cheat on homework, create scams, disrupt social media with spam and terribly off-putting fake images, publish books and songs nobody wrote and nobody wants, all while using obscene amounts of energy? The world doesn't seem more futuristic or in any danger of getting wiped out by some autonomous AI thing that's been given access to nukes, both typical major themes. The world to me just feels more empty and boring. It's just a new tool hucksters can use to defraud people.

Some of the other things the tech oligarchs are pursuing are also cliche themes of science fiction: space exploration, the metaverse, the meta glasses, Musk's Neuralink. So if AI did not turn out as expected, how's the rest of this stuff gonna work out?