Is racism okay if it's against...

[TheMeInTeam]

White supremacy is about the supremacy of a fictional white race over other fictional races.

So yeah racism against fictional races can result in all sorts of horrifying misdeeds.

When I played MTG custom maps in StarCraft 1, white magic sucked. Black magic did too. Filthy alien scum and their blue/green/red supremacy.

The casual enslavement of obviously sentient and social robots in Star Wars has always made me Hmmm just a bit.

Are they sentient? Even if some are, are all of them? They are machines built for a purpose. It is possible in principle to make machines that act in an extremely wide variety of patterns despite having no motivations outside that responsive programming. Thinking about automated conversation bots today, those are obviously not sentient and not very advanced, but it's possible in principle to imagine versions of that which are more sophisticated, enough to reach the standards shown by some of the bots in Star Wars.

AI does open up some interesting ethics questions. But keep in mind this is the same fantasy setting where far more familiar basic slavery is commonly practiced on living beings (including humans), so the robots aren't the only ones getting a short straw here. Equal opportunity crimes against civilization gogo.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Not to mention the ones that are actually capable of fighting back (battle droids) are purposely programmed to have lesser intelligence and autonomy than, say, protocol droids. It is even stated specifically that was done intentionally to prevent a rebellion against their enslavement.

IG-88 comes to mind... Some of the old EU books had IG-88 Planning a robotic uprising and placing his program into the second death stars computer... His last thoughts before the second death star exploded were "I think, Therefore i am."

 

[Senethro]

Given that Star Wars is space fantasy with space magic fuelled by love and hate, I suspect the robots are authentically sentient.

Slavery of humanoids is what the bad guys do and is portrayed as bad. Slavery of these "droids" with very human-like characteristics is what everyone does and even messiah-like figures don't seem to question it.

I don't expect AI to look anything like C3PO or HK47 so I don't think it says much about treatment of sentient machines, it just looks to me like an oddly unexamined question in the setting about some people being fit for servitude.

 

[Hygro]

Small correction to this entire thread: Discrimination against fictional species (orcs, elves, dwarves, tentacle aliens, etc.) is specieism, not racism. Racism, in a fictional setting, would be something like high elves discriminating against wood elves.

You don't select your species in DnD you select your race. Your example would be subracism.

Duh

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You don't select your species in DnD you select your race. Your example would be subracism.

Duh

In which edition did it become race? The way I learned it, choosing to be an elf or dwarf was just like choosing any other character class, at least in the original game. As the AD&D game kept on, however, that's when character classes became insanely specialized.

The most complicated AD&D character I ever tried was pretty basic - a multiclassed female elven fighter/magic-user.

The most exasperating AD&D character I ever tried was a human bard... whose instrument was the concertina. It was fun. *evil grin*

 

[Commodore]

You don't select your species in DnD you select your race.

Inaccuracies in language like that are the reason DnD players get made fun of.

 

[Virote_Considon]

Skyrim is for the NORDS.

 

[Senethro]

I figure its got to be Summurset for the next Elder Scrolls. Double helpings of fantasy racism for all.