Why aren't there any robots or sophisticated AIs in the Star Citizen universe?

Yeah, that's two different questions. We've got robots. We've got drones. There are robots.

Yeah, I guess to get into the larger question about just the AI thing, synthetic life, I suppose: it's not for a scientific reason or anything like that. It's purely the fact of, when setting out to create something like this, what is the world that you want to make? Again, with any large universe, people sit there and go, what are their influences and what are their personal tastes and stuff like that. From the earliest conversations with Chris, he wanted it to feel like a very tactile world; he wants people to be out doing stuff. You get to be the baddest pilot in the universe because you are that cool. So it was a stylistic, artistic, creative choice to say we didn't want AI, because obviously, AI developed will be the most efficient, best pilots, crack shots. If you read the Iain Banks stuff, where armies are waging war across galaxies and just firing shots and destroying each other and stuff like that, that's a very specific type of sci-fi space opera thing. And Chris, again, wanted it to feel more gritty, people-driven. So it was really just, that was the thing. And then we had to come up with a reason to back-explain it. The original statement was, I'm not really a fan of AI or synthetic humanoids, just because of A, B and C. And so I was like, okay, so we could pepper all of these incidents throughout history where attempts to make AI have gone horrifically wrong. And every 20 or 30 or 50 years, someone's like, oh, I think I can finally crack it. And then that goes wrong. And everyone goes, you know what, this AI thing is just not really our bag. So that's the core of it. Again, it's a break from a forward projection of what life will actually be like in the 30th century and stuff like that. This is just how we wanted to tell the game.

Yeah, so we had these horrible experiences with people trying to develop AI that created these laws that we live under. But there are those fears that so much of our technology in the game is connected through the comms and Spectrum, and the idea that if you have an artificial intelligence, the danger that it would pose to our way of life, potentially not even if they are malicious and mean to harm us, but there is that threat there, like modern thinkers always warn us about: oh, the next big threat is going to be AI. So you have those people still existing in lore who are like, we can get most of what we need done with our advanced computers, really smart, intelligent computers, without them being able to think freely for themselves. We've just set the mark somewhere else.

Yeah, they have the capacity, I think it's called dumb AI, where the systems are smart and can do really, really cool stuff, but they need that input. You tell them to do it and then they can do really, really cool stuff. But it still needs that human aspect, because again, if you want to be the coolest pilot or the best hauler, it's about getting out there and doing it, not just chilling out in your penthouse sitting on tablets and sending out an army of hauling drones.

Yeah, which is going to be interesting when we get that gameplay in, because we do have these cargo-moving drones. We do have the idea of combat drones. So people, I think, are going to get a little bit more of that fictional flavor that they're looking for once we get these drones running in game and have the different kinds of them, so that you will have your robot helpers coming along with you and doing stuff for you. And when you're in the city, you'll start seeing them moving around and stuff. That'll be another level, I think, that we're striving for, that science fiction fun that we're not at yet.