: Considering how dumb they made the simulacrums and they have to make a cyborg
: of one of their own to act as a remote controller for their s'pht, and
: that most of their technology is stolen, this suggests that they don't
: have a good understanding of how to program A.I. This is necessary for the
: story because why wage wars to enslave races and sell them when they can
: just build robots? The Occam's Razor answer would be that they don't know
: how to make their own robots (they can't be lacking resources with so much
: of the galaxy at their disposal). But then they have the pfhor drones in
: M2. Maybe those don't have independent AI and need a remote cyborg
: controller as well?
There is an explicit mention in M2 by Durandal of a Pfhor AI and its pitiful incompetence compared to him.
I have wondered before why a sci-fi setting like Marathon would ever have slavery, since surely robots are much cheaper than slaves and anyone capable of running an interstellar empire must be able to build robots.
But yeah, maybe software is the issue. Maybe the Pfhor are just incredibly incompetent at building machines that can think well enough to do any useful work, so they have to co-opt evolved intelligences, and at best augment them with mechanical enhancements.
The Juggernauts look in some cases like they are partly organic, what with the faces and all. The Drones in M2 also have faces. Could the Pfhor install Pfhor brains into machines to build the closest thing they have to robots?
Or maybe they're capable of programming robots that can do some rudimentary things, but nothing smart enough to replace organic slaves.
