Droid sentience is more like a used laptop that's had all the annoying reminders and shortcuts turned off. Some people like luke prefer them like that whole others reformat to factory settings to avoid the problems that can come with it.
This gets talked about and shown a lot in the EU novels. Always kinda creeped me out, "teehee my toaster's personality was annoying, so I had its personality wiped."
It was rare because they actually did consider him sentient. There's of course the famous episode Measure of a Man, but the one I remember is when Picard indirectly threatened Data in Clues, when he found out Data was keeping a dangerous secret from the rest of the crew.
PICARD: "Do you know what a court-martial would mean? Your career in Starfleet would be finished. Do you also realize that you would most likely be stripped down to the wires to find out what the hell went wrong?"
There also seems to be a vague distinction between, say, C-3PO and R2, who are both always referred to as male, and then the Trade Federation droids like this one, who seem to mostly, but not always, lack sentience, and are fairly wholly reliant on an external "brain", if you will, a la The Phantom Menace, or indeed the Omega in Edge of Tomorrow. So... Yeah.
Thanks to Solo, we know they are capable of being annoying feminist type activists, as well as being clearly given a gender by someone in their personality.
Star Wars has always been rather vague on the sentience of the droids. Given their is no biological imperative, gender is useless to them.
Droid sentience is more like a used laptop that's had all the annoying reminders and shortcuts turned off. Some people like luke prefer them like that whole others reformat to factory settings to avoid the problems that can come with it.
This gets talked about and shown a lot in the EU novels. Always kinda creeped me out, "teehee my toaster's personality was annoying, so I had its personality wiped."
This is fairly directly inferred in Interstellar, as well, with TARS and whatever the other robot was called.
Like, he directly threatens TARS with that at least once, so, yeah, it's definitely a trope...
Can sort of argue that Star Trek did this with Data, on occasion, too...
It was rare because they actually did consider him sentient. There's of course the famous episode Measure of a Man, but the one I remember is when Picard indirectly threatened Data in Clues, when he found out Data was keeping a dangerous secret from the rest of the crew.
There also seems to be a vague distinction between, say, C-3PO and R2, who are both always referred to as male, and then the Trade Federation droids like this one, who seem to mostly, but not always, lack sentience, and are fairly wholly reliant on an external "brain", if you will, a la The Phantom Menace, or indeed the Omega in Edge of Tomorrow. So... Yeah.
Thanks to Solo, we know they are capable of being annoying feminist type activists, as well as being clearly given a gender by someone in their personality.
Yes the whole Droids are slaves thing really adds an unnecessary and awkward metaphor. The whole fucking them thing is icky