Star Wars, Despite All the Droids, Is Not a Fully Automated Universe

It’s May the Fourth, and we’re thinking about the workers – not the robots – who built the Death Star.

Monday is May 4 – or May the Fourth, an unofficial holiday observed by fans of the Star Wars media franchise on this date because “May the Fourth” sounds like “May the force (be with you).”

So, because it’s May the Fourth and also because it was very recently May Day, let’s think about the future of work in Star Wars. The films (and books and TV shows) are famous for their droid characters, typically subservient sentient robots whose very existence suggests the world of Star Wars is heavily automated. Why have robots if not to put them to work?

Well, about 20 minutes into the very first film, in fact, Luke Skywalker’s uncle – a farmer on a rural desert planet – sees fit to buy two of them for farm labor, even though C-3PO is a protocol droid and R2-D2 is an afterthought:

But Star Wars is also very intentionally a “used future.” Not only are the droids bought secondhand but Luke’s uncle plans to use C-3PO to interface with his moisture vaporators; retrofitting a droid built to be a translator to instead repair farm equipment. The family speeder, when we see it, is so beat up it looks like it’s been through a hailstorm. The Millenium Falcon, when it shows up, is very used-car-coded, and Han Solo and Chewbacca are constantly maintaining it to keep it in working order. What’s more, the backgrounds of all these movies are full of old spaceship husks and secondhand robotics and machinery. That suggests that civilization in Star Wars is industrialized, but not to the point that its built environment and the materials in it are simply made and maintained by machines. There are droids everywhere on Tatooine and Coruscant and in the Cloud City, but automation has not replaced manual labor. Not unlike our own reality of increasing AI use and automated factories, it just kind of augments it.

And we can have a little certainty of this because of a major canonical event in Star Wars’ fictional history: The destruction of the second Death Star.

Now, nerds for decades have studied and debated nearly every plot point in Star Wars you can imagine, and the details of the Death Star’s demise is no different. What sets this moment apart, however, is it was discussed at length in Clerks, a 1990s indie movie about deeply unmotivated convenience store employees. In this scene, one clerk observes to another (both big Star Wars fans) that a lot of construction contractors were likely killed when the half-built space station is blown up during the climactic battle in 1983’s The Return of the Jedi:  

It’s the kind of critique only someone who’s watched this movie dozens of times is likely to have made, which is part of the humor here. But the Star Wars universe has explored the construction of the Death Star plenty since. A recent Star Wars TV show hints strongly that forced labor built the Death Star. George Lucas himself, citing the Clerks scene, said a race of space termites built it. And lots of other Star Wars TV shows and books refer to it or mention it as a kind of sub plot.

But it’s worth noting the clerks aren’t talking about all the construction robots destroyed in the attack. They’re presuming that people were at work in those roles.

Leave it to the universe-spanning galactic Empire to use space termites and prison labor to build its huge war machine. Seems kind of evil to include them in such a project, like it’s guilt by association. However, if it could have used robots exclusively to get the job done, the Empire almost certainly would have. It was hustling to get that thing built. It was needed to stamp out the Skywalker-led rebellion! And sending droid workers up into orbit to get the Death Star finished certainly would have been more efficient.

But the Empire didn’t do that, and I suspect it’s because it couldn’t. And that’s because that’s not the universe in which Star Wars is set. A long time ago in this galaxy far, far away, work is not fully automated. It still requires labor; labor that is augmented by the existence of droids but not subsumed by them.

And that seems like a good place to land on this morning, May the Fourth: All labor has dignity.