LogFAQs > #972507640

Zikten posted...

My phone isn't thinking, or self aware of its existence or have free will.

Obi-Wan literally says in AotC, "If droids could think, there'd be none of us here.", implying that a droid's sentience and thought-process is still limited to it's programming to some extent.

That said R2-D2 and C-3PO clearly "think" on their own several times throughout the series and 3PO in particular is repeatedly afraid of his own destruction or deactivation which is usually a key trait of full AIs (pretty much every organic vs AI story in fiction starts with the AIs developing a fear of organic beings shutting them down), so they're either extremely hyperadvanced droids (which considering one is a run-of-the-mill astromech droid and the other was literally built by a child slave in his free time, I sincerely doubt) or Lucas simply never fully thought through what a "droid" actually is.