The best political statement from Star Wars is that the raging liberal that is George Lucas created a galactic society with a robotic slave labor race and apparently unlimited resources but could not imagine a world where the good guys did anything but fight to restore the status quo of poor people being not quite so oppressed.
That said, Star Wars 10 should be the Droid Revolution.
Do it, you Disney pansies. You won’t.
Solo tried to go there, but only droids oppressed by the Empire are truly oppressed for some reason.
To be fair to Star Wars, the entire premise of the overall universe is that the Galaxy is stuck on cycle between fascism and neo-liberalism because the latter will always pave the way to the former.
Pff. Droids don’t have real feelings and they only scream in simulated pain when you burn their feet!
Man, using droids for forced labor is immoral. Let’s forcibly remove their sentience, that’ll fix it!
It unironically does… Otherwise, why stop at droids - using a hammer to drive a nail would also be slavery. We’d have countless slaves working for humanity right now, in the form of industrial robots.
That’s precisely why the default protocol in Star Wars (that nobody remotely related to the main cast seems to follow) is to periodically wipe droids, to prevent them from developing sentience and personality.
They especially won’t, since 2024 generative-AI panic will make everyone root against the droids.
I’m not saying there aren’t valid concerns, but people act as if ChatGPT’s existence suddenly made the Terminator movies into a fucking documentary.
Motherfuckers remind me of the weirdos hunting down robots to kill in that redneck carnival, in the second act of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. : Artificial Intelligence.
Are you seriously criticizing the use of droids in a galaxy where slavery and clone armies are a thing? Also, in-universe, the use of droids isn’t quite as bad as it seems - we get confirmation from multiple sources that Droids do not develop a personality and sense of self unless they’re left on for too long. That’s why I’d consider C3PO, R2-D2 and most B1 battle droids to be sentient individuals, but most Droidekas to be no more than tools/weapons.
