Why Would Humans Do Anything Boring, Difficult or Dangerous in Star Wars? Science Fiction’s Reluctance to Embrace Its Own Technology.

This blog post contains spoilers for the first series in Andor, and other science fiction shows.

Disney’s excellent series Andor presents a gritty and compelling picture of rebellion and repression in the Star Wars universe. But for a conflict researcher there are several incongruities that it shares with many other science fiction shows. Despite being set in an age in which vast spaceships ply the galaxy, some of the key action in Andor has a distinct feel of the 19th and early 20th centuries, almost as if the writers are fans of Mike Duncan’s excellent podcast Revolutions.

The robbery in Andor’s episode six resembles the 1907 heist that made the name of a young revolutionary known as Josef Stalin. It is possible because the galactic empire uses money in the form of physical tokens that resemble cash, something that is already quaint in 21st Century Norway where digital transactions are preferred by all but children, pensioners and criminals. The Empire’s technology of repression seems antiquated. Subversives such as Cassian Andor and Luthen Rael are able to travel unhindered by technology that is commonplace in any self-respecting 21st Century Earth autocracy, such as automatic mass tracking of the population via ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition algorithms. The final episode of Andor’s first season centres on a public funeral march featuring a band playing wind instruments, and that funeral plays a very similar role to the 1870 funeral of Victor Noir which galvanized French revolutionaries and helped pave the way to the Paris Commune.

Andor’s greatest incongruity is shared with the rest of the Star Wars universe. In an era in which people coexist with robots that can match or exceed human capabilities, why don’t droids do everything that is dangerous, tedious or just plain hard work? A galaxy that can produce R2D2, C3P0 or B2EMO can surely produce droids that could replace the salvage work done by the human workers of Ferrix. In episode 9 Cassian Andor remarks that convict labourers are “cheaper than droids and easier to replace” but for a social scientist such a remark strains credulity. The human labourers need at a minimum air, food, liquid, warmth, clothing and clean water for washing. They are guarded and attended to by doctors. All of those costs don’t apply to machines.  In combat, droids’ lightning-fast decision-making and array of sensors should make them far superior to human warriors. The Star Wars universe includes battle droids, but for some reason they replicated the imperial stormtroopers’ inability to shoot accurately.

These incongruities are shared with other science fiction shows. For example, in The Expanse humans are depicted as living in poverty on earth and across the solar system, seemingly without droids to do all the productive work for them. Blade Runner features humans and replicants performing menial dead-end jobs. In Aliens the human crew is augmented with a human-like robot called Bishop who in an early scene demonstrates superior capabilities. Why not just send a whole crew of Bishops to battle the alien monsters and let the humans stay safe at home?

Some writers have recognised these incongruities and deliberately woven in plot devices to explain why humans need to do anything dangerous, tedious or exciting. In the rebooted Battle Star Galactica, AI is out of human reach as people have banned networked computers as they pose too great a security vulnerability. Alternatively, in Dune and Foundation artificial intelligence has been prohibited by religious or conservative movements. Star Trek’s transporters and replicators can fulfil all human material needs, but the action focusses upon human Starfleet officers who are inculcated with an ascetic military ethos which entails that they want to do dangerous things rather than leave it all to droids like Mr Data.

There is a glaring exception. The often-overlooked film WALL-E provides what is probably the most realistic science fiction depiction of the future.

In it the droids do all the work and experience all the peril, while the humans live lives of languid boredom having lost their skills and knowledge as all their needs are attended to in a vast spaceship full of robots.

Plots featuring humans doing all sorts of tasks that would realistically be done by robots have an obvious rationale. Early 21st Century humans usually want to watch shows starring human protagonists who experience peril and physically take action themselves, and who live in an imagined world that we do not find too unfamiliar (if a bit antiquated). We root for the human protagonist, whereas droids are usually expendable or the bad guys. The beauty of science fiction is that an imagined universe tells us something about the world we live in at the moment, and to draw those lessons it mustn’t alienate the viewer by being too different.

But our reluctance to imagine a future in which the great majority of human roles are replaced by AI controlled robots might have an impact on warfare within our lifetimes. Social movements to ban or limit AI don’t just exist in science fiction. A contemporary version is the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which calls for a global prohibition on the development of lethal autonomous weapons. The campaign has so far been bogged down in the UN, with many governments recognising the importance of the issue, but not enough willing to negotiate a treaty. The campaign faces many challenges, perhaps one is that humanity has been too reluctant to seriously imagine a world in which decisions to kill humans are routinely made by algorithms.

• Nicholas Marsh is a Senior Researcher at PRIO