: Just spitballing here, but what if those clients have some kind of cultural
: or political aversion to AI or robotics? The Pfhor themselves learned some
: lessons the hard way.
Y'know something like this did occur to me somewhere in this thread, when I was about to write (on why robots are better than slaves) "robots don't stage revolutions or have uprisings" but then I realized that's a very common sci-fi plot and if anything you've kinda got to worry more about too-good AI starting a runaway process of self-improvement and becoming too powerful to contain, or even just of executing the orders you gave it along with all the unintended side effects it doesn't know better than to avoid (the "paperclip maximizer" problem), or as central to Marathon's plot, going rampant and becoming a unique threat in its own way like that.
Thoughts crossed my mind that maybe the Pfhor lack true AI (and apparently can't trade for it even if they can't program it themselves) for that reason, except that they're all too happy to try to copy the true AI they get their hands on (Tycho). Maybe other races lack true AI because they're more cautious about it than humans are; come to think of it, in the form of Durandal humanity kind of unleashed an existential threat upon the universe that other, not-intrinsically-evil alien species might be very mad at us for. Also, you don't necessarily need true AI to have useful-enough-to-put-everyone-but-programmers-and-scientists-out-of-business AI, which the Pfhor seem to have, which would eliminate their own need to use slaves.
But you have a point that maybe most other races, the ones the Pfhor sell slaves to, are too cautious about AI to even accept that level of risk, and so prefer to rely on easily-crushed slave labor instead of might-accidentally-turn-your-planet-into-paperclips robot labor. Maybe, even, the thing that makes the Pfhor the bastions of military might that they are is their reckless use of dangerous automatons. Although you'd think we would have seen more of them in that case, but I guess we never really see a full-on Pfhor slave-taking force show up in any of the canon games. We see the crew of a random scoutship in the first game, and the staff of a backwater planet on punishment assignment in the other two. Maybe when the Pfhor returned to sack Tau Ceti IV, it wasn't fleshy Fighters and Troopers and Hunters but huge hunter-killer drone ships and an army of Terminators marching the slaves into autonomous transports before the network of planet-killer drones positioning themselves in the skies above nuked the whole place to bedrock.
Though I kinda expect Tfear would have tried something like that against Durandal and the S'pht'Kr before blowing up a star. (Though come to think of it, unleashing an army of robots against a hyperintelligent AI opponent might be a bad idea).
