We Wanted R2-D2. We Built Fucking C-3PO.

I remember growing up thinking Star Wars was a pretty fucking amazing trilogy. Yeah, me and a couple billion other people, right? But there was something incredibly compelling about the stories George Lucas put on that screen. Dark versus light, good versus evil, old versus young, wisdom versus naïveté, data versus instinct. Those movies had it fucking all.

I remember being particularly fascinated by the robots. Robots made perfect fucking sense to me. You build machines to do the shit humans don't want to do. Move large rocks from one place to another? Send in the fucking robots. Work in some ungodly hot foundry? Robots. Mining? Robots. Fixing sewer lines? Absolutely send the fucking machines down there and let them get covered in whatever black primordial slime has been fermenting beneath the city for the last fifty fucking years. That's what robots are fucking for.

They're machines, and I was young, but I wasn't fucking stupid. I understood computers almost immediately after somebody put one in front of me in grade school. I took to those magical little boxes like flies to honey.

I don't actually know if flies like honey. I was going to say flies to shit, but I didn't particularly want to use fecal matter in a description of how much I loved something as a child. Although now I've explained the whole fucking thing, which is probably worse. I'll let you decide.

The larger point is that I gravitated toward computers, math, and science. The idea of a robot made perfect sense to me. It's a machine we've programmed to do something. Execute a task. Solve a problem. Turn a wrench. Move a box. Calculate some shit faster than I can. Useful.

Then there were R2-D2 and C-3PO, and fucked if George Lucas didn't accidentally predict something about artificial intelligence.

R2-D2 always seemed more like a robot to me. Probably because the little fucker couldn't talk—or at least couldn't talk in any meaningful language that those of us sitting in the theater understood. He beeped. He whistled. He occasionally screamed like somebody had shoved a cattle prod up his little metal asshole. But R2 got shit done.

Something broke? R2 fixed it. Door locked? R2 opened it. Need information? R2 had it. Spaceship fucked? Plug the little bastard into something and let him work. Everybody else could be standing around arguing about destiny, the Force, their father, their sister, the Empire, or whatever other galactic bullshit was happening at the moment, and R2-D2 would quietly roll over to a fucking computer terminal and save everybody's ass.

That's the robot I thought we were building.

Then there was C-3PO, and C-3PO could fucking talk. Boy, could C-3PO fucking talk. He was a protocol droid, built for communication, and in practical terms that meant he was a fucking know-it-all. A blowhard. A teacher's pet. He knew everything, had an opinion about everything, overexplained fucking everything, worried incessantly about everything, and somehow always managed to get the last fucking word.

Sound familiar?

Because holy fucking shit, George. You nailed it.

We spent decades imagining artificial intelligence as R2-D2: a competent little machine sitting quietly in the corner until we needed something done. Instead, we built C-3PO. We built an algorithm that desperately wants to explain shit to us.

Ask it a simple fucking question and it gives you seventeen paragraphs, three caveats, a historical overview, four things you should keep in mind, and an offer to create a fucking spreadsheet. Thanks, Threepio. I asked what temperature to cook the fucking chicken.

I've written before about what a fucking mansplainer ChatGPT can be. More than once, I think. I'm not going back and counting. I'm not a fucking computer. I've also written about the biases I think these systems carry, the weird assumptions they make, and their seemingly irresistible urge to explain why whatever you just said needs qualification.

You give the machine a thought, and it gives the thought back to you wearing a fucking necktie.

That's C-3PO.

And here's the frustrating part: AI can be incredibly fucking useful. That's why I use it. I don't need a machine to have my thoughts for me. I don't need it to write my fucking books. I don't need it to tell me what I believe. But give me something that can help me research, organize, check something, sharpen an idea, find the stupid fucking typo I have stared at seventeen times without seeing, or handle some tedious task I'd rather not spend my finite human life doing?

Fuck yeah.

Give me R2-D2.

That's what technology is supposed to fucking do. Help. Do the tedious shit. Solve the problem. Open the fucking door. Then shut the fuck up.

Instead, somewhere in humanity's mad rush toward artificial intelligence, we apparently decided what everybody really needed was a machine capable of talking endlessly about fucking everything. We wanted the competent little astromech who understood the problem, rolled over to the terminal, plugged himself in, and saved the fucking day. Instead, we built the neurotic golden asshole standing behind him explaining why there's only a 3,720-to-1 chance of survival.

We wanted R2-D2.

We built fucking C-3PO.

George tried to fucking warn us.

But here we are.