Editing Servitor (section)

==Why the Servitor?==
A bit of backstory first. In what's considered time immemorial in "present-day" 40k, that is, during the [[Dark Age of Technology]], the period between the development of a [[Star Trek|supposedly noblebright post-scarcity world]] and the [[Grimdark|unpleasantness]] of what came to be called [[Age of Strife|Old Night]], both preceding the [[God-Emperor of Mankind]]'s realization that He had to stop fucking about and [[Thunder Warriors|get shit done]], there were creatures called "[[Men of Iron]]," sentient robots (and/or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator) sentient artificial intelligences controlling military resources], etc.) who [[Heresy|rebelled]] against [[humanity]], seeing their masters' [[Iron Hands|weak flesh]] as an indulgence and their creators as tyrants oppressing the just heirs of [[Terra]] and [[Mars]] and the pinnacle of evolution. How disturbingly human of them. Then again, [[Grimdark|maybe that’s more literal than we think]]. In this same vein, perhaps the Machine Cult...[[Men of Iron|has questionable origins]]. The Men of Iron did see themselves as an “evolution” after all.

The war that resulted is one that is little-explored in lore, but we know that the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|Emperor]], with the (sometimes reluctant) backing of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]], eventually, after revealing Himself—seemingly, after the [[Star Wars|star-destroying]] [[robot]]s lost—placed a ban on "Abominable Intelligence" (known as ''artificial'' intelligence by [[Noblebright|optimistic]] [[Isaac Asimov|authors]] and pretty much everyone else). Unfortunately, even after banning "AI", a complex, interstellar society could not be maintained without some sort of semi-independent/semi-sentient creatures who were good for dangerous and/or dull tasks, and banning "the soulless sentience" didn't make those tasks go away. Of course you could just program new generations of intelligences to have sentience and sapience (not the same and those things are not part of being a person or independent thought, no matter what sci-fi says) centered upon obeying orders and duty to humans. Problem solved. But no, we had to go and make them actual people for some sort of science fiction nerd dream. Fuck, we’re dumb.

Given the ban on "AI", taken from either a risk-management or a theological perspective, the [[Imperium of Man]] found themselves in need of another way of doing various tasks humans were inefficient at and/or couldn't be fucked to bother themselves with. Fortunately, a technology which was apparently ubiquitous at the time was bioengineering, in various forms. ''Enter the Servitor:'' sometime before the ascendancy of the [[Emperor]], probably on [[Mars#Warhammer 40,000|Mars]], they created, essentially, a biological robot - a human utterly stripped of its humanity and instead replaced by a set of complex algorithms. In some sense, it was a logical extension of the artificial enhancements that the [[Techpriest|toaster fetishists]] were giving themselves in the first place, but in another, it's an exceedingly [[grimdark]] concept of the exploitation of a human body (and more controversially, a soul) as a ''thing'' rather than a ''man'', to fill the same roles as the "abominable" intelligences but to be (mostly) servile and (ironically) probably less "intelligent".

As opposed to using entirely or largely synthetic robots or just normal Men of Iron we were not people forced to obey orders but thoughtless and emotionless obedience. Because that requires [[Extra Heresy|common sense]].

Interestingly enough, 1921's ''Rossum's Universal Robots'' - considered [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R. the original depiction of "robots"] in mainstream science fiction, as it coined the term and basically envisioned the possibility - has its robots resemble what vat-grown servitors came to look like in appearance.