Why Don't the Jedi Use ChatGPT?

What Star Wars teaches us about technology, storytelling, and worldbuilding.

A bunch of us friends used to go out to movies together, back before Covid, kids, and streaming. The habit of the group was to watch the movie, then head out to a pub where we’d list all the flaws in the story, cinematography, acting, etc. I enjoyed the company, but didn’t participate much in the criticism sessions. The group’s philosophy seemed to be that flaws ruined the experience for them. For me, inconsistencies, incompleteness in storytelling etc. were opportunities. I would always enjoy the movie for what it intended to be before judging whether it actually got there; and then, for whatever shortcomings I saw, I’d make up reasons why, in that particular storytelling world, they weren’t flaws at all.

So, rather than criticizing the art, I’d repair it in my head as I went along. Unlike my friends, I was satisfied with every movie we went to. —Well, almost every one: some movies are insults to our intelligence that should only be watched when you’re either very drunk or very sick and high on benadryl.

The Star Wars universe is beloved by millions. I know very little about it because its lore is not limited to the films but has been fleshed out over the decades by countless novels. (Oddly enough, I remember reading the novelization of the first movie before it opened in our town. Not sure whether that’s true or just bad memory sequencing, but I experience the movie as the adaptation of a book, and not the other way around.) The Star Wars universe is a rich milieu of classic space-opera styling, and for many people it’s likely the only exposure they’ll have to the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of 1900s science fiction.

There were certainly stories about city- or country-wide computers before the 1950s (mostly cautionary tales), and Dick Tracy had his phone-watch. We take Star Trek’s communicators for granted nowadays, but the idea of portable phones was pretty radical in the 1960s; still, people had thought of them. In the 70’s Star Wars put us in a universe that deliberately lacked such tech—and for good, solid, story reasons.

Retro-Futures as a Style

Image courtesy of Retrenders: https://retrenders.com/2016/10/13/make-coffee-with-star-wars-droid-r2-d2/#more-20074

Star Wars is appealing because it’s nostalgia. George Lucas was very clear about the influences for the universe he created, and they were Saturday-morning serials, B movies and epics such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

To criticize this kind of story for not including 21st Century technologies completely misses the point. These tales aren’t trying to keep up. They’re looking backwards fondly, and there’s a lot of fun to be gotten from going along with the ride.

This is what “suspension of disbelief” is all about.

There’s another option, though—two, really. The first is to have a super-high bar for your suspension of disbelief and consequently to nitpick your way through a movie. Well all do this to an extent, especially when the plot includes stuff that we know a lot about, whether that be local geography for a film set in our area, knowledge of physiology if we’re in the medical professions (“he could never have survived that!”), or politics or law. Fair enough.

The second option is to neither suspend disbelief, nor be critical. It’s to worldbuild your own solution to the gaps you see. If you’re interested in storytelling and worldbuilding, either as a writer or as an approach doing foresight, this is an exercise you should consider.

Spackle for Stories

Take the example of the Star Wars universe. If you don’t simply suspend disbelief and go along for the ride, then there’s a lot here that’s problematic. Despite the token alien, this seems to be a human-run galaxy; why is that? Sure, the Republic may be thousands of years old, so everything will look lived in, but on the other hand, they have a whole galaxy’s worth of raw materials at their disposal. There’s literally no scarcity, so even if we had a modern-style consumer society where you have to replace your phone every year for the newest, shiniest model, a galactic industrial base could easily keep up.

Then there’s that lack of phones, and the lack of infrastructural AI—droids have minds, so why not spacecraft, cities, and factories? Obviously this is to maintain the style and atmosphere of the story and to constrain things so that only certain kinds of stories can be told in this universe. But if we neither accept that, nor dismiss these questions as ‘mistakes’ then we have the opportunity to try to come up with explanations for them that make sense in the context of the world that’s been presented.

In a geeky sort of way, this is tremendous fun. For example, one troubling aspect of the Star Wars universe is that droids appear to be sentient, yet they are universally treated as completely disposable slaves. In a galactic civilization supposedly inclusive of a wild variety of alien species, why the exception for synthetic minds? On the face of it, Luke and Leia are both unrepentant slave-owners, which is disquieting.

My third option demands a designer’s approach to the dilemma. What conditions would make droids’ lack of rights make sense? If we take oppression off the table (because we want to consider Luke and Leia to be heroes, and the rebellion to be an attempt to free all the galaxy’s sentient beings, not just the organic ones) then we’re left with one elegant solution:

In the Star Wars universe, droids are not actually sentient. They are like ChatGPT: computers that are very good at imitating consciousness and personality, without actually having either. And, in this far away galaxy, everybody knows this.

There will be no droid Spartacus, because there is no actual suffering happening amongst the droid population. They really are just machines, so they have the same rights as a toaster no matter how much they may protest and act anxious. Luke and Leia are not slave owners. C3PO and R2D2 are no more conscious than a video game character.

Regarding the strange lack of infrastructural AI and analogues to ChatGPT—or even, the weird lack of smart phones in this highly technologically sophisticated society, working out an explanation is a little trickier. It’s also more rewarding, because when you get an answer to this question, it unlocks some amazing new ways to look at humanity’s cultural, scientific, and technological future.