Will there be artificial general intelligence android characters in the lore?
TL;DRNo: there won't be general-AI androids, because AI would take human skill out of piloting and in-universe AI attempts went badly, so robotics instead means dumb AI and non-humanoid drones.
No. We've talked about this a few times.
Several times. People like robots. I like robots.
Yeah, the idea was that there would be non-synthetic human robots running around rather than AI-driven stuff. Part of it was originally just a stylistic choice. Part of it was to explain why, because obviously an AI would be able to pilot your ship a lot better than a human pilot would, so it was a justification for Chris of why he wanted people to be in their ships flying around. And so the second we started to introduce AI and these super brains, it would take the human ability out of the equation, because they would just be able to operate at such a faster speed, and it was not the style of world that he was looking to build. So that was the initial thing. And then we started coming up with all the lore trappings of all the failed attempts by humanity to try and develop AI, and it always goes wrong. There was the traffic incident, and obviously the Artemis was a huge catastrophe.
I'm just trying to remember what happened on the Artemis.
It disappeared. It was an AI pilot and the ship never came back. But yeah, I think we have very advanced computers that simulate human interaction, like when you're contacting an air traffic controller.
I think it's technically called dumb AI, where it's not making its own decisions, it can just react to input.
But I think overall, the path of advanced robotics in the empire headed towards complicated drones, building machines for the most idealized purpose and shape for what it is, and humans aren't the best at a lot of stuff. It was always that weird thing of, oh, you're going to build the ultimate fighting robot? You make him look like a human? No, you make him look like a tank with a big gun. And I think the complication of having basically these robotic servants that look like humans is also kind of a squidgy point in the empire, for their comfort level with having that kind of intelligent humanoid slaves, for lack of a better word. So very intelligent drones and robots and stuff like that, but just not human-shaped.