Editing Robot (section)

== Warhammer 40,000 ==

Early editions of [[Warhammer 40,000]] had robots available to [[Imperium of Man|Imperial]] and [[Chaos]] armies. They actually had programs that their players would execute, mostly relating to the priority of which targets to engage. [[Forge World]]'s [[Horus Heresy]] game features machines clearly inspired by the old miniatures as part of the Mechanicum army list.

Lore revisions in later editions fleshed out the backstory of the Imperium and added a robot rebellion. The galaxy-wide revolt of the [[Men of Iron]] was one of the events that ended the [[Dark Age of Technology]] and plunged humanity into the [[Age of Strife]]. Yes, a post-Asimov "What has SCIENCE done?!?" story. Evidently the 40K universe never had any Asimovs, or forgot all about them by the year 20,000. (They did and didn't forget; Chaos fucked everything over in a way they simply could not plan for.) 

Ever since then the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] has a hard, enforced at gunpoint no-go on research about "abominable intelligences" (at least in public), because they realized it tended to turn out for the worst. Instead, they use limited, non-learning "[[machine spirit]]s" for their technology, cortex plates (organic processors made of brain tissue, actually capable of limited learning) or modified human brains (e.g. [[servitor]]s and [[servo-skull]]s) to operate more independent machines. Despite the restriction on using robots, most [[tech-priest]]s end up looking rather robotic themselves, especially as they replace more of their bodies with mechanical parts. (And let us not speak about [[Belisarius Cawl]] and his 'totally not-AI' copies of himself.)

The [[Tau]] use lots of robots in their armies, mostly their [[Tau drone|drones]], but they have yet to encounter a rebellion. If anything, their relationship with their robots is more of a partnership than one of masters and slaves. Their Ethereal caste specifically forbade making the drones too sentient, arguing that the "Greater Good" would encompass self-aware machines, and that essentially building a slave race was a bit too grimdark for them.

The [[Necrons]] are all robots, all the time, with a hefty helping of [[undead]] thrown in as well. They are also the only faction that openly uses fully sentient AI in the form of their canoptek constructs and tomb AI. Their enslavement protocols are so sophisticated, only one AI (the Sarkoni Emperor) actually managed to break free and gain independence, and only due to the extreme damage the whole tomb complex sustained due to a radiation storm.