Heck, you could be a program designed to post the most unreasonable side in a discussion ever, for all I know.

A little strong there. I don't think what I'm writing is "the most unreasonable side". We have in-universe people stating as if common knowledge the limitations of droid thinking (and that's not just Obi Wan. As I wrote, one of the selling points of the clone army is that they can think creatively). We also have most instances of droids following programming that in many cases they'd clearly rather not - i.e. behaviour is at odds with expressed personality. This all seems to argue against true sentience.

I think it's not unreasonable to view droids as the mobile, more useful descendents of Tamagotchi. Even R2-D2 calls C3-P0 mindless at one point. (Okay, okay - he calls him a "mindless philosopher", I'm not seriously using this as evidence that C3-P0 and R2-D2 are simply both running Amusing Personality Traits v3.4 ).

I think that's very much a stretch. The droids have highly varied, complex personalities. I think it's far more likely that they're simply sentient beings with their own personalities, rather than someone decided to load R2 with the 'testy *******' personality and put C3PO in 'whiny git' mode.

The point of the video is that we can see emotions expressed - and believe in those emotions - by things that are demonstrably not capable of possessing them. A droid could arrange dialogue on the fly just like that movie clip above has it set in stone. In neither case, would it necessarily be real. The thing about the "complex personalities" you talk about is that the droids roll off the assembly line with these personalities in place. C3-P0 never learned to be what he is. The first time he's turned on (which we see on screen) his personality is in place. This appears to be true of all droids. If a personality is constructed whole-cloth doesn't that lead us to conclude that it is artificial and not necessarily tied to sentience?

On the other hand, if you take into account The Clone Wars and a few parts of the prequels, R2-D2 does seem to be something of an exception. But I think in some ways that's a concession to the audience.

What about Grevious? He started as a living being and became (mostly) a droid, correct? I'm trying to think of examples of droids demonstrating actual creativity.

Heck, you could be a program designed to post the most unreasonable side in a discussion ever, for all I know.

A little strong there. I don't think what I'm writing is "the most unreasonable side".

I thought the winking smiley would be a dead give-away that I wasn't serious...

What about Grevious? He started as a living being and became (mostly) a droid, correct? I'm trying to think of examples of droids demonstrating actual creativity.

- R2D2 fighting the battle droids in Revenge of the Sith

- R2D2 pushing C3PO from Jawa's barge when he is experiencing fear o f Heights (another dead give-away they are sentient)

- C3PO's "I say, were you looking for me?" *Waves*

- C3PO being extremely happy to see R2 again

- C3PO going against his programming and impersonating a god (him jammering while flying around on the throne is also not something I think a programmer (Anakin in this case) would have added)

- C3PO cursing (creative language) at Chewie

- C3PO and r2 cursing at each other

- The head droid in Jawa's Palace stating they will eventually "break" R2D2's fiestiness

Man, there are dozens of examples...

I'm still a bit confused about droids. I strongly believe in the VI/AI theory, because most droids just seems "walking machines" that just follow orders, but some of them seems to have "human" emotions like, fear, happiness, compassion, friendly-sense (that expression exist? XD)

Here is another sample with "human emotions". Fear in this case http://starwars.com/explore/encyclopedia/characters/battledroid513/

I think people aren't asking the right questions. The most obvious to me is, Why?

Why would anyone (who's not exceptionally stupid) want to mass produce fully sentient droids? There are so many ways that could go wrong, and very few ways in which it might go right. If I want to make something that can tell me to piss off, I'll have a child.

I imagine that most droids are not sentient. They mimic human behavior because it amuses their creators, not because it is necessary to the tasks they are built for. Sentients requires free will something droids don't have. Even Jedi mind tricks only influence. They don't mind control. Droids can be mind controlled. They have restraining bolts. They must follow orders.

R2 appears to be a massive exception. He alone of the droids in the movies displays creativity. Sorry Dante but I don't consider most of your examples to be creative in any form (Swearing is creative?! Really? Then every sailor I ever served with is a friggin' Leonardo Da Vinci). The ones I agree with are all R2.

Other than R2, droids in the movies are not adaptable. They go to their deaths, or do stupid things all the time. Yes, they display basic defense actions, but that's a simple program that makes them not waste their owners money.

Okay, so I actually have a bit of experience with AI programming in the real world, and I think I have a self-consistent explanation for how droids in Star Wars operate, based primarily on movie canon and my knowledge.

The simpler droids have simpler direct programming, and among other things it should be trivially easy to copy them and whatever information they have in their droid brains. But as droids get more and more complex, they use more and more heuristic algorithms (HALs) to drive their behaviour, and those HALs operate on neural networks. Those HALs are not something that you can program directly, you can only train them to behave certain ways. The more complex droids have more complex circuitry for learning and adapting their own HALs, based on their experiences.

Each droid has a record of the "Fresh from the factory" training values, and when you "wipe" a droids memory this is what it gets reset to. This gives you the baseline functionality where certain skills and behaviours are trained in certain ways and to certain levels, but once the droid has been powered on and starts learning, those HALs tend to drift.

The HALs are specifically designed to operate much like human memory, and use different technology than normal direct computer programming as most people would understand it. You could call this "Positronic" in nature, or whatever you want. But the point is that you can't just read these values with trivial ease (as you might with regular RAM or ROM). You could, theoretically, copy all the HALs and their values, but the permutations and combinations of how those algorithms would interact with each other in the "real world" get prohibitively expensive to try to simulate. If your copy is different from the original by just one atom, that could potentially mean the difference in how a particular HAL operates, becase an inherent part of the nature of training HALs is that they are done "in situ", and that training is inherently dependent on the particular hardware that it is running on. Apply the exact same training to a slightly different unit, and you might get a slightly different result.

So, at droid factories, what they do is build a number of prototype units, train them all, and then select the ones whose resulting features they like best for the next round of training. Over time, this group of surviving units gets smaller and smaller, until they finally arrive at a unit that meets the desired criteria, and is judged to be "better" than the others. That surviving unit is then taken and they go through the extraordinarily complex process of extracting the HALs in a meaningful way, so that they can become the "factory default" mode for a pre-production line of droids. They do small modifications, and then feed those back in and do another pre-production run. Once they're satisfied, they can start the first "real" production runs.

Note that HALs can incorporate "knowledge", "talents", and "skills". The droid is able to extract knowledge that has been encoded in the HALs and distill that down into a digitial format that is easily interchangeable with other droids and computer systems, but this takes the willing and active participation of the droid itself. You wouldn't be able to do this process without their assistance, at least not without whole roomfuls of extremely expensive and difficult equipment to operate, just like they have at droid factories. And even then, that kind of equipment is meant to extract information on a mass scale that can then be applied in a cookie-cutter fashion to other droids, instead of trying to actually understand the information that is being extracted and target just the particular bits that you want.

Also note that skills can only be trained from one droid to the next, the information on how to perform that cannot be extracted and distilled into the same kind of easily interchangeable information as you can do with knowledge. And it might not be possible at all to train talents from one droid to another. The deeper and more complex the behaviour, the more difficult it is to train, much less distill down to a simple format that can be easily interchanged with others. Higher orders of HALs are dependent on interactions and meta-interactions and meta-meta-interactions with other HALs, and as the order increases it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to understand how that network of neurons works, regardless of whether those neurons are organic or digital in nature.

HALs are why you can torture droids. They are also why you might need to torture droids in order to get them to choose to divulge information that they otherwise would be inclined to protect.

I think R2's exceptional, but I don't think he's unusual. That PCs can play droids is a big hint there (otherwise the GM could step in at any time and say "Your programming demands you do X." rather than their actions be through Player choice).

How we've ran it (through WEG, GURPS, SAGA and now FFG systems) is off the shelf, they're not sapient. As they start adapting to new situations and learning better ways of doing things (as they're designed to do) they develop not only preferences but bugs. Eventually this either leads to corruption or true intelligence. This process takes a long time*, which is why - in the universe our characters inhabit - droids need periodic memory wipes.

* Unless the GM has a story in mind. Or wants to discourage PCs relying on droids to plug skill gaps. Or wants to throw an awkward ethical complication at us for some reason.

I imagine that most droids are not sentient. They mimic human behavior because it amuses their creators, not because it is necessary to the tasks they are built for. Sentients requires free will something droids don't have. Even Jedi mind tricks only influence. They don't mind control. Droids can be mind controlled. They have restraining bolts. They must follow orders.

For most NPC droids, that is true. But PC droids can resist their restraining bolts.

R2 appears to be a massive exception. He alone of the droids in the movies displays creativity. Sorry Dante but I don't consider most of your examples to be creative in any form (Swearing is creative?! Really? Then every sailor I ever served with is a friggin' Leonardo Da Vinci). The ones I agree with are all R2.

One thing about humans is that they are endlessly creative with the things they can control. And when you can't control much else in your life, usually the one thing left to you is your language. So, yes -- within the tight confines of the human language(s), they probably are "...friggin' Leonardo Da Vinci", because all of their creativity has been bottled up into one very small outlet.

Other than R2, droids in the movies are not adaptable. They go to their deaths, or do stupid things all the time. Yes, they display basic defense actions, but that's a simple program that makes them not waste their owners money.

I would add C-3PO to that list. R2 wasn't the only adaptable and creative droid in the movies. There weren't many, but he wasn't alone in that regard.

They have restraining bolts. They must follow orders.

Hmm. If they must follow orders, why do they need restraining bolts? Seems like robo-disobedience was a problem that needed fixing. Sounds like some droids (certainly not all) are capable of making their own decisions.

I would think fully sentient droids able to make independent decisions are a better way to avoid the droid revolution than something lesser. A lesser device could be subverted and reprogrammed. Individual droids with individual personalities and free thought in many cases are going to develop relationships with sentients like R2 and 3PO did where they would actually be very likely to protect the organics they live with.

I don't think survivors of Alderaan are too concerned with what droids might do as compared to what organics did to them.

C3-P0 never learned to be what he is. The first time he's turned on (which we see on screen) his personality is in place. This appears to be true of all droids. If a personality is constructed whole-cloth doesn't that lead us to conclude that it is artificial and not necessarily tied to sentience?

On the other hand, if you take into account The Clone Wars and a few parts of the prequels, R2-D2 does seem to be something of an exception. But I think in some ways that's a concession to the audience.

Notice in TCW Obi-Wan's reaction to finding out that Anakin has never given Artoo a memory wipe. He's angry! It's standard procedure, and Anakin has flaunted it. Possibly because he feels attached to Artoo (which Obi-Wan calls him out on, since Jedi aren't supposed to have attachments), but also possibly because he views droids as more than simple computers running programs. He has a lot of reasons to appreciate and respect Artoo enough to believe that he deserves to keep "living."

What about Grevious? He started as a living being and became (mostly) a droid, correct? I'm trying to think of examples of droids demonstrating actual creativity.

Traditionally (since the WEG d6 RPG days), cyborgs have been treated in-universe with the same disdain people hold for droids, due to a number of societal factors. So the phrase "mostly a droid" could well be a product of in-universe bias.

Apologies to those who supress all knowledge of the prequels, but on the assumption that they are valid and correct, what did the above line mean?

Good, worthwhile thread.

Especially R2 is a droid that is described as rude, feisty, bold, etc. all personality traits that don't seem to be a manner of programming... They truly feel... Remember R2's whining pitch when the doors slam shut on Hoth? That is emotion.

Are droids in Star Wars sentient? Absolutely.

R2, all alone in the canyon on Tatooine, whistling to himself and then acting scared when there are noises and shadows? Why would a droid - with nobody else around to interact with - be displaying emotions? He does it again in the swamps on Dagobah, just before being jumped by the swamp monster - sure Luke was nearby, but he was pretty happily chirping to himself.

Why would you build a roomba with fear? Yet the mouse droid ran away from chewie. Why would you build a 9-volt battery that doesn't want to be tortured? Why would you build a droid that liked torturing droids?

Hmm. If they must follow orders, why do they need restraining bolts? Seems like robo-disobedience was a problem that needed fixing. Sounds like some droids (certainly not all) are capable of making their own decisions.

You only need restraining bolts when a droid changes owners, to keep them from obeying the orders from their previous owners, which is what R2 was doing when he ran away in EpIV. This is why Luke did it. He applied the restraining bolts as soon as he bought them. Before he even cleaned them up. C-3PO, in that situation, wasn't given special orders by Leia/Antilles so he simply accepted Luke as his new owner and started obeying him.

My "why" question is this ... If given the choice between droids being sentient and droids being tools programmed with "quasi personalities", why would anyone chose to run a Star Wars RPG where droids are sentient? It brings up all sorts of issues like rights and slavery into a space opera. Plus it makes many of the "good" characters from the movies into real A-holes.

I supose that its a social conscience thing. Societies must evolve, like with woman, afro-american people and maybe in a future animals and ecology too.

Big laser guns and flying ships doesn't guarentee that you came from and social, "humanitarian" and advanced society.

Probably, SW universe has a lot of things to do and learn yet. Anakin itself (yes, that guy that after that made massacres) treat R2 as a trully friend against Windu or Obi droid despotism (High Jedi Masters from the council).

It could be a great "hook" be a member from droid liberation movement Again, its everyone choice.

I think droids can be sentient. I think the vast majority are not. This gives rise to Obi-wan and others like him questioning whether any droid can be sentient.

Fear is not sentients. Bacteria display a fear-like response when they flee from chemicals that can kill them. Are bacteria sentient? If they are, then we are all monsters guilty of genocide.

I would build a droid that tortured other droids because I am lazy and torture takes time and is boring. I would program it to mimic the emotion "like" because it's an easy way to determine if the droid is following it's basic programming.

I code web interfaces for a living. Most of what I do isn't making the program do it's job, it's about communicating with the human running the program. Basic emotional response would be an easy, quick way to impart info to a human.

We are programmed to respond to emotions. The error message a computer displays can be anything I want, but I don't write code that says things like, "Stupid moron, you have to actually check the box for the thing you want." I imagine that droids convey frustration because the guy coding them got tired of answering stupid tech support calls. It's not the droid's frustration it's the developer's.

At some point, some exceptional droids, move beyond the programmed response and make the response their own. This is when sentients emerges. It's the old saw about, "Can a robot have a soul?" The answer is, "If God wants to give them one."

In the game the GM/Player is the god who endowed the robot with a soul. Just don't expect other robots to have a soul, because their creators don't want them to have one.

I would imagine droids would be just like people and there are probably any number of droid underground/terror organizations employing a number of different tactics. Just as zealous and committed to their cause as any organic and probably just as divided as their organic counterparts. Similar to the internal struggle of the Cylons in BSG.

why would anyone chose to run a Star Wars RPG where droids are sentient? It brings up all sorts of issues like rights and slavery into a space opera. Plus it makes many of the "good" characters from the movies into real A-holes.

When my GM throws too many sentient droids at us, I do point out how unrealistic that is. But no sophisticated droids developing sentience would feel equally unrealistic, given how many are portrayed in the films.

I stick with rare sentience rather than none. All makes Han and Obi Wan look like terrible people, I agree. None makes Luke look like a fool for fussing over R2.

I would imagine droids would be just like people and there are probably any number of droid underground/terror organizations employing a number of different tactics. Just as zealous and committed to their cause as any organic and probably just as divided as their organic counterparts. Similar to the internal struggle of the Cylons in BSG.

I have to disagree here. What you are proposing denigrates the intelligence of everyone in the Star Wars universe.

If droids were prone to acting out or disagreeing, then no one would make them. In Battle Star Galactica the Cylons are a mistake that humans deeply regret. That's not how Star Wars work. Sure there are droid rebellions, but they are rare and often due to a fault in the system somewhere.

No one wants to make a toaster that: says that it doesn't feel like it, sexually harasses its co-workers, needs sick days, wants vacation, wants you to pay for it when it gets old, needs time off because it got drunk, etc.

Any company that made such a toaster would be out of business shortly.

My "why" question is this ... If given the choice between droids being sentient and droids being tools programmed with "quasi personalities", why would anyone chose to run a Star Wars RPG where droids are sentient? It brings up all sorts of issues like rights and slavery into a space opera. Plus it makes many of the "good" characters from the movies into real A-holes.

Personally I think it's part of Lucas' subtext that AI is actual intelligence, and the tragedy is nobody seems to care. Clearly there is a very large grey area wrt sentience/sapience, etc; but also as clearly, the organic meatbags have nearly universally decided that mechanical intelligences and "lives" are only worth as much as the trouble it takes to replace them.* This allows for all kinds of comedic/tragic interplay, but here's the thing: that interplay is destroyed if you change the premise. If people start to care, then it's no longer comedy. If AI isn't "real", then it's no longer tragedy. You can only leverage this if you dance the line.

What I find interesting about that is this line is never really crossed in all 6 movies or TCW episodes. The question is never "answered" once. Either that's an amazing accident, or it's fully intentional and part of the compelling enigma and mystery that is Star Wars. For my games I prefer to continue to dance that line.

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* The Jedi stance is easier to understand because they don't view droids as having any connection to the Force, therefore they are simply machines and any behavioural resemblance to emotions like fear or empathy, or any of the semblances of "living beings", is artificial.

R2 appears to be a massive exception. He alone of the droids in the movies displays creativity. Sorry Dante but I don't consider most of your examples to be creative in any form (Swearing is creative?! Really? Then every sailor I ever served with is a friggin' Leonardo Da Vinci). The ones I agree with are all R2.

Adhering a high quality to the creativeness is of course not the issue. If Leonardo Da Vinci is the benchmark for creativity then none of us are creative.

And swearing is indeed a sign of creativity, do you know how many of the 8.000 words invinted by Shakespeare were curses, insults and put-downs?

I would imagine droids would be just like people and there are probably any number of droid underground/terror organizations employing a number of different tactics. Just as zealous and committed to their cause as any organic and probably just as divided as their organic counterparts. Similar to the internal struggle of the Cylons in BSG.

I have to disagree here. What you are proposing denigrates the intelligence of everyone in the Star Wars universe.

If droids were prone to acting out or disagreeing, then no one would make them. In Battle Star Galactica the Cylons are a mistake that humans deeply regret. That's not how Star Wars work. Sure there are droid rebellions, but they are rare and often due to a fault in the system somewhere.

No one wants to make a toaster that: says that it doesn't feel like it, sexually harasses its co-workers, needs sick days, wants vacation, wants you to pay for it when it gets old, needs time off because it got drunk, etc.

Any company that made such a toaster would be out of business shortly.

So what are PC droids other than models that disagreed with being someone's servant? IG88? Seems to me it's quite common for droids to begin to act independently. If they truly act independently then a number of them joining together and acting in concert is very likely. A galaxy with trillions of sentients is likely one with tens of trillions of droids, so it's completely plausible there would be a myriad of droid terror groups.

I would imagine droids would be just like people and there are probably any number of droid underground/terror organizations employing a number of different tactics. Just as zealous and committed to their cause as any organic and probably just as divided as their organic counterparts. Similar to the internal struggle of the Cylons in BSG.

I have to disagree here. What you are proposing denigrates the intelligence of everyone in the Star Wars universe.

If droids were prone to acting out or disagreeing, then no one would make them. In Battle Star Galactica the Cylons are a mistake that humans deeply regret. That's not how Star Wars work. Sure there are droid rebellions, but they are rare and often due to a fault in the system somewhere.

No one wants to make a toaster that: says that it doesn't feel like it, sexually harasses its co-workers, needs sick days, wants vacation, wants you to pay for it when it gets old, needs time off because it got drunk, etc.

Any company that made such a toaster would be out of business shortly.

This hardly seems like a fair representation of what people have said here.

A toaster is not a droid, just as a blaster is not or a lightsaber or any other machinery isn't either. However, it seems that once a droid has the capacity for independent thought a personality crops up quite quickly.

I suggest Her by Spike Jonze as an awesome example of this!

So what are PC droids other than models that disagreed with being someone's servant? IG88? Seems to me it's quite common for droids to begin to act independently. If they truly act independently then a number of them joining together and acting in concert is very likely. A galaxy with trillions of sentients is likely one with tens of trillions of droids, so it's completely plausible there would be a myriad of droid terror groups.

What makes the PC disagree? That's where sentients begins. That is what makes the PC special. That initial disagreement.

Normal droids don't disagree other than in programed ways. C3-PO is telling Luke, "I'm not much more then an interpreter," because it is a clever error message. It's "I am not programmed to do that," Star Wars-ified. Clearly, droids almost never disobey because their creators don't want them to. If droid terrorists were common, people (like in BSG) would outlaw building them. People are not stupid overall, and especially not when it comes to survival.

In Star Wars droids can make the leap to true sentients, but even when they do they often retain a core of their old programming. R2 still likes fixing things, helping his friends, and trying to insult C3-PO into "waking up" (which 3PO gradually does over the course of the movies).

Interestingly enough, Terrorism is a stupid way to make a political point. More often than not, it galvanizes your opponent into crushing you. Terrorists can have situational intelligence, but at heart are deeply stupid.

If droids "almost never disobey", why are restraining bolts so ubiquitous? Clearly we simply disagree about the level of independence of droids.