In a post-apocalyptic future planet where robots are the only sentient life... why would they use wild-west and WW2-era tech?

Question

Context: The setting is a future where the planet is pretty much a giant city and due to reasons has become a post-apocalyptic landscape. Humans are long dead and the only sentient life left are the robots and androids the humans made to serve them. Due to neglect, system failure and a rather nasty computer virus, some of these bots have gone... feral (for lack of a better word). In this case, many of the surviving robots have armed themselves for protection and to hunt the feral ones for the parts needed to survive.

Now, to make an entire planet a city and develop sentient robots we're talking tech levels waaaay ahead of us. So plasma rifles, railguns and all manner of fun military toys could have existed, but I am enamored with the idea of a humanoid robot walking through a giant, ruined city with nothing but a backpack full of parts and a lever gun or tommy gun in his metallic hands.


So the question I need to ask is - how could I make it where that level of tech would be common in this setting? And yes, the robots would be making this tech themselves, not just grabbing old Winchester leverguns and Colt peacemakers from museums.


Currently the only idea I have is that railguns and plasma guns require a lot of high-tech equipment to build and maintain. Whereas 1870's-1940s (or 1960s even) tech is simple in comparison, so the tools and machines that can produce firearms and remain in operation are better suited to this older level of tech after centuries of neglect.

And as mentioned previously, the older tech would be - at least theoretically - significantly easier to maintain. Ammunition itself could additionally remain relatively advanced (e.g. explosive rounds) with few modifications to the firearm for that time when a robot needs to defend itself from others.

Answer 1

One answer as to why your robots don't use advanced weapons is the same reason we don't, they have no idea how to make them. Most robots made to serve humanity would likely be in service jobs which has certain limits on what you would need them to be capable of. Why would you give a chef bot intricate knowledge on the creation and maintenance of plasma weapons? Why give a maid robot the processing power to solve theoretical physics?

Guns (especially older guns) are much less difficult to make, maintain, and probably much lower risk to use. Imagine some one gave you a gun and said that it could in a single shot atomize any target, however if it wasn't properly maintained it would explode in your hands probably killing you. That is how many of your robots may think of the advanced weaponry they find. Now a few robots may use these high risk high reward weapons but for most it is overkill in almost every scenario and it is to dangerous to even carry.

To add to the variety of your world you could have ex-military bots who do have the advanced weapons and know how to build/maintain them and they style themselves as "big game hunters". These robots either hunt "feral" military bots or the sky scraper sized robots that would need to be around to build a city-planet

Answer 2

The simplest approach would be, as far as I can tell given the tech levels, to have the robots' programming dictate that they need to use those weapons.

As a potential option, have the protagonists' enclave be a reenactment park, where humans used to go to watch robots reenact scenes from the old West. For realism, the robots used live rounds, and were programmed in the care, maintenance, and manufacturing of the weapons and ammunition. With the understanding that they were fully-sentient, severe restraints were placed around their ability to "improvise" beyond these tools when it came to fighting.

The park was network-isolated from other parts of the planet-city, so when the Psychosis Virus rendered so many of their kin into Nullminds, they were protected. However, now that supplies have started to run out and the enclave power system has become spotty, they've had to venture out, sixguns in hand, to see what they can scavenge.

Railguns/laser rifles/etc may be difficult to maintain, but nowhere near as difficult as robotics and the kind of computers required to sustain sentience. So if you're trying for realism, it's hard to reconcile the inability to maintain complex weapons with the ability to maintain themselves unless it's externally imposed.

Answer 3

From OP

And yes, the robots would be making this tech themselves, not just grabbing old Winchester leverguns and Colt peacemakers from museums.

But the first ones did.

More advanced weapons were made by the persons who made these robots, but the area where the robots are have no such weapons. Nor is there detailed information about these weapons available to the robots.

There is a museum and in the museum are the sorts of weapons you describe. From the museum the robots are aware of how humans fought each other in the past. Robots do not create or invent, but they can repair and maintain. They copy these methods, and copy the weapons in the museum.

Answer 4

Since people seem to have overlooked an obvious reason: power.

The robots have their own built in power supply; external power supplies have broken down and the infrastructure needed to repair them doesn't exist any more. A lot of our modern technology relies on precisely machined equipment, which are themselves the product of precisely designed machinery which are ...you get the picture. The other point is that a lot of electronics are based on rare earth minerals, which are only available in small quantities in comparatively few mines worldwide. Without reliable transport, most futuristic batteries and storage systems simply cannot be manufactured.

What you are left with is technology that is comparatively robust and does not require external power or even large amounts of power; technology, in this case weapons, that can be easily manufactured from a non-industrial base. That immediately brings us down to flintlocks, swords, spears etc. Assuming robots are stronger than humans and better at precise, repetitive work, one could expect them to overcome some technological limitations without the use of additional machinery, e.g., rifling and rolling gun barrels by hand, which brings us to early 20th century levels. Anything post-WWII is Space Age, and requires infrastructure and investment a post-apocalyptic world would not have. What you absolutely don't have is access to large amounts of cheap power to refine raw materials, create alloys and composites and manufacture storage devices.

Answer 5

One very interesting aspect of AI that you might explore with this is the creativity and inventiveness of your AI robots. If we assume that the robots live in a civilization that has completely fallen apart, we can introduce old, anachronistic weapons for the same reasons we might do it in a human-dominated post apocalyptic scenario: because they are basically reinventing technology that has already existed because it is easy to replicate and build out of whatever they can find.

The strangeness is the fact that the robots themselves require some very sophisticated parts and maintenance in order to survive. So why would they be using low tech tools? It's logical to think that they would have pretty extensive maintenance manuals on themselves readily available. They may even have some "plan B" emergency maintenance/survival plans readily at hand (I may be showing my age, but this conjures images of "Number 5" stealing a die hard car battery after being beaten up by punks). So they have some decent resources as far as being able to figure out how to keep themselves going with what they can find.

What if their limitation with tools is that they lack human creativity? They build replicas of weapons they find in their fragmentary historical records left over from before the fall of civilization, limited by whatever they can find that has full schematics, complete instructions, and detailed, step-by-step methods spelled out to make them. They lack the ability to bridge a creative gap, innovate, develop a completely new idea or technology. They build tommy guns and lever action rifles because they have records of them. The only really advanced thing every robot is totally capable of understanding and repairing is themselves.

This would be a great way to introduce a lot of anachronistic technology that doesn't seem to fit together. You could have a civil war era gatling gun, a WWII SMG, one guy with a bazooka, and another guy with a musket. They all have fragmentary bits and pieces of the technological understanding that used to exist and they would pass around the complete "recipe" data files to manufacture weapons and tools as very valuable trade items.

One cool twist with this scenario is that a robot with a lot of foresight might realize that they actually need humans in order to innovate again and start developing new stuff. If they just continue to scavenge among the ruins, they will eventually all succumb to entropy. Maybe someone sets out on a quest to find a human who may have been locked away in a cryogenic freezer? Maybe they try to find a lab that can genetically grow new humans? Maybe a single human survivor becomes a strategic asset to several robot factions who go to war over him because they want to control the only source of innovation? Lots of potential spin off story ideas could come from that.

Answer 6

Conserving scarce resources

The robots don't want to waste precious plasma, vital electricity and powerful electromagnets destroying their spare parts on the hoof. But cordite and metal tubes are not valuable, and the relatively low damage makes salvaging resources from victims more viable.

Counter counter measures

The advanced weapons have advanced counters that work better than the weapons. The robots note that playing catch with plasma and hyper-velocity copper isn't getting anywhere but a low speed lump of lead passes right through the magnetic shields.

Tradition

Time was you had a disagreement with your neighbor you rearranged the neighborhood on a subatomic level. But then they ran out of neighborhoods. By convention only limited combat is tolerated now. It is considered bad form to destroy more than a couple buildings in a personal fight.

Fail safe

When a gun doesn't work right, which is more and more often as things are increasingly work arounds for work arounds of fixes, it costs you a hand and an eye you can replace at the next swapmeet. But if a phaser goes off wrong it could degauss your wallet.

Answer 7

Advanced technology is a moral problem for robots

The same way our society has put boundaries to what our scientist can do (e.g. cloning humans, fetal experimentation), this robot society might have thought that such a technology would hit too close to home and banned it from production. So, the present robots simply don't have access to that technology, and don't have the time or resources to invest on R+D.

Robots have built-in resistances to modern types of weapons

As you mentioned, robots were developed when all of those weapons already existed. One would think robots would make really good soldiers. Maybe the society that developed them made them resistant to the most powerful weapons of their enemies (plasma guns, and so on). So, when robots need to start destroying other robots, they need to find an alternative kind of weapon.

And guess what weapons were overlooked by the designers because no one was using them anymore. Good ol' firearms.

Answer 8

I'm liking Jdunlops idea a lot, but here's my own 2cents.

The humans built deliberate limitations into the 'bots, they kept their intelligence at around human average IQ, and programmed limitations into their long term memory, lets say they can't recall further than a few months or a year back.

They pre programmed a level of WW2 experience and knowledge into their positronic brains. They would have had some basic self-help routines built in. So if a 'bot got injured in the field, it could patch itself up enough to get back to the repair shop. Think field-medic vs brain surgeon. So this level of self maintenance allows them to use cannibalised parts but they can't make any new parts.

As a twist, you tell the tale from the POV of the WW2 bots. Then we find out that the "ferals" are actually more advanced and have managed to work around their programming limitations. The "ferals" have a reputation for destroying 'bots, when in actual fact they're kidnapping the WW2 guys. Then taking back to "Feral Base" where they're shown how to break their programming. Then they're sent back out into the world to re-educate more WW2 bots.

How did they break their programming ? A few years ago the first "feral" started to write a diary...

Answer 9

All the fancy plasma guns and rail guns and lazzors relied on high pulse power, which came from standard antimatter-based power cells that you could purchase at Wal-Mart before going to the range with the kids to blast some targets. Ah, those were the days!

Unfortunately, after the 2186 incident at Chernobyl 3 which turned Ukraine into a smouldering crater, the humans wisely decided to move the antimatter-generation facilities on the moon.

They were, of course, the first targets to be hit during the apocalypse. Or maybe they just blew up on their own and everyone blamed the Russians as usual, which triggered world war 4. No-one remembers for sure.

But these power cells have been out of stock for a while, and the technology to build them is long gone. So the plasma lazzors are useless.

This is like trying to build a modern cpu: it requires tech, knowledge, devices and materials from all over the world, equipment built by many different companies in many countries, which in turn requires more of the same... It is a very interconnected system in which all parts are vital. This is very different from milling a barrel for an oldskool rifle.

The robots survive just fine with standard batteries because they need average power in the hundred of watts range, they don't need weapons grade pulsed power cells in the gigowatt range. So they can use a solar panel or a small windmill to recharge.

Answer 10

The technology in advanced weapons is the same technology in the robots. If they are having to scavenge for parts to repair themselves, then there is already a reason they can't produce these advanced components (probably a lack of infrastructure). Therefore when you find an advanced weapon, you break it down for parts rather than using it on others.

This limits your choice of weapons to those you can produce using resources you don't need to maintain yourself, and with a lack of infrastructure.

Answer 11

Have you seen HBO's Westworld? The basic idea is that it is a park where humans can interact with other characters, most of whom are played by androids. Both the humans and the androids use Western level technology. Six guns (revolvers), bows and arrows, etc.

If you add a second section of the park with a World War II theme, you could add that equipment as well.

For some reason, humans stopped coming to the park. Only the robots are left. But they continue to play their parts because that is what they know how to do.

The giant cities could be other forms of entertainment. Or where humans used to live. If humans lived there, you'll need to explain why they don't still. A plague is certainly possible. Or warfare. Or a biological weapon used in a war. Then the planet was abandoned as too difficult to clean up. Fast forward a thousand years and the plague is dead, but people already moved to other entertainment worlds.

Perhaps the high tech robots were sent to fight the war. It was deemed too much work to reprogram the park robots, but factory robots and such could be used off-world.

Answer 12

If you're looking for a realistic answer, there are two considerations...

If the sentient robots are the equals of their creators

• Most people don't realize that sentience isn't limited by technology (if it is, it isn't sentience). Fully sentient robots would care about entertainment and history, they would also experience madness (I once asked a talented programmer I know how an intermittent error could exist in the finite world of programming. He laughed for a week.). In other words, your robots are just humans with a slightly different set of limitations (more suseptible to EMP, less suseptible to blunt-force trauma, for example). If this is the case you're looking at, then all of the answers to "why would humans...?" are equally applicable. Why does this matter? Because fully sentient robots that understand themselves have no reason other than the human reasons to utilize older technology. They are as capable of performing research and likely have a subtantial advantage due to the potential to network in a way that looks very telepathic to humans.

If the sentient robots aren't actually sentient, but have programmatic limitations...

• In this case, the robots have all the cognative capacity, but they don't (for example) have access to the technology. They're stunted by the lack of modern facts to re-develop the technology. Or, while being sentient, they may not actually be free. Programming may intentionally limit their ability to research more advanced technology (a great safety feature if you're trying to avoid the robot apocalypse.) In this case, robots literally can't develop more modern technology. (Can you imagine a robot-surgeon who is looking at the dismantled remains of a damaged peer only to realize something about yourself is making it impossible to contemplate the question, "how does that chip work?" or, worse, "I've run out of that replacement part. How will I build ano... SQUIRREL!)

Answer 13

The robots are hardwired to create and use only weapons which their prior human rulers see as harmless.

The humans are now all dead because of
1. the war which killed most of the population
2. the radiation which killed a sizeable amount of survivors
3. the lack of food following the nuclear winter
4. and the rest of them who were in the bunkers simply were too traumatized, killing themselves of grief or begin infighting which offed humanity.

The war machines powered finally down because after all enemy robots were killed they had no use and died. The only surviving robots are service robots which had a kill switch and for good measure they were hardwired not to create weapons which were deemed dangerous for their rulers. The service robots had auto repair (convenient for their users) and were capable to build an own infrastructure to survive indefinitely.

As they were not armored, they begin to create weapons which were ridiculous against the hafnium-tantalum nanotube carbon armor and the 40 watt plasma rifle humans had, but are sufficient against their own kind.

Answer 14

Robot intelligence is based off human intelligence. They literally worked out how human minds develop and mimiced it. They can do modest things, like a bit of speedup, but more than that and the human intelligence doesn't work.

They can, however, copy the resulting robot intelligence. And they can tweak them to some extent.

What they did to make useful robots is generate a human-like intelligence that was amazingly neurotic about following laws. Like, obsessive-compulsive. And when they managed to generate that intelligence, they mass produced it, and trained it in various ways.

There are laws against military style weapons. And those high tech weapons are military style.

On the other hand, with the ability to copy and back up, one common form of entertainment was using ancient weapons (gunpowder weapons) and have robots kill each other.

Robots with an entertainment license where thus permitted to own, service, and shoot other robots with said guns. The law was intended for entertainment purposes only, but the robots, while they follow laws compulsively, don't always follow the spirit of the law.

The result is that robots who manage to acquire an entertainment license have the legal right to use various kinds of reenactment guns (western cowboy guns, WW2 reenactment guns, and maybe other ancient law reenactment guns) and use them to shoot other robots. The law did not prevent you from shooting robots that had no entertainment license (an oversight), but it did restrict you do doing so within an entertainment zone.

However, entertainment zones can be generated without the intervention of humans through arcane rituals. These entertainment zones where regulated and defined (by various protectionist regulatory capture back when they where in style), but the definitions can be warped. For example, a western entertainment zone has to have a saloon and a corral, and each such zone has a limit in size.

The robots have managed to lawyer a saloon into a place that liquor is purchased with a liquor license, and corral is any enclosure with a non-human inside and a lasso. So to turn an area into a legal battlefield, a simple ritual involving trading cash for alcohol, drawing a circle on the ground and swinging a lasso, is sufficient if you have a license to open a western entertainment zone.

A given proprietor can open up at most one entertainment zone per year (anti-monopoly defense).

You don't know if you are in an entertainment zone until some robot starts shooting.

Gunslinger robots have entertainment licenses. Most do not, however, have entertainment zone licenses.

Warlords and Bandits often have entertainment zone licenses. Some are more useful than others (easier to set up, or last longer; some licenses require a zone to remain profitable to stay open, for example).

Alternatively, maybe most of the planet has become a designated entertainment zone with a few exceptions over the ages. As in, entertainment zones are not allowed within 100 meters of a child care facility, and there is one licensed child care facility left on the planet.

Answer 15

The historical records told them to.

Hypothetically speaking, suppose only two sub-sets of ancient video records survived whatever happened. To AI, data is paramount. Such records may eventually take on the role of instructions... perhaps even commands. Data templates to be used as the blueprint for all of mechanical life: what to look like, how to behave, even how to interact with other robots / AI units.

The 42 of the AI universe.

Perhaps even, the robot Bible, if you will.

Answer 16

If you want a viable limitation reason, you have provided one in your question- "Humans are long gone"- the advanced weapons could have been created in a way that only limits their use to humans, as a measure to avoid robots/androids taking over the world during human era.

Those may be limited by fingerprint, retina, alive human tissue verification, and many many more- but they would all require a living human to work. With people long gone, not a single operable high-tech weapon, or a blueprint of one without the limitations exist. There may be variety of them scattered around (based on assumption the apocalypse was human war based), they might provide parts for repairs of the characters, but they cannot be operated.

You can even use this as a goal for the adventurers- search of a legendary, high-tech weapon that can be used by androids / robots; a struggle of re-creating one without the limitations; a fight over a single one that exists etc. - sky is the limit.

Simple weapons are operated strictly mechanically, so these limitations don't apply, hence they can use the weapons you mentioned - anything with electronics between user and firing mechanism could have been modified to be limited.

Answer 17

It is possible that the virus and the lack of modern weapons are related. A common cause of post-apocalyptic landscapes is war. Both sides are fighting with the best tech they can manage, including battle droids. What if some person made this virus to destroy battle droids, and (intentionally or accidentally) introduced it to both sides. In order to prevent more from being made, he also introduced the virus to the databases on weapon construction. Some few robots not directly involved in fighting evade the virus, but to access information on modern weapons, they themselves would fall victim to it. So they start from the beginning while trying to rebuild.

Answer 18

Basically, I think the AI decided to use the resources needed to make the more advanced weapons to progress in other areas. Being logically superior, and noticing the incredible stockpile of weapons that humanity (or other races) left behind, there was no need to manufacture new weapons, especially when there are already plenty available that are capable of causing any necessary devestation.

Instead of using the resources to build more weapons, they used the resources to expand their robot population, focusing only on controlling life, and ensuring that their hegemony endures for ages to come.

There is also the side to consider where these weapons are less capable of harming their "species" and if they were to manufacture more advanced weapons, they could fall into the hands of some sort of resistence, giving their enemy the ability to harm them where the conventional weapons are much less capable.

Answer 19

Even though humans had left this plane of existence centuries ago, androids inherited more traits from their former masters with every generation. For 8ᵗʰ generation androids, even fluffy emotional experiences like spirituality and nostalgia had become familiar concepts. As such, androids started romanticizing human history and especially the century between 1850 and 1950 AD, which was marked by the dawn of a technological evolution that would lead to the birth of AI.

Humans of this era were venerated in a way not different from how humans once venerated their Gods and their ancestors. While some androids lost themselves in the religious worship of whom they rightfully considered the creators of their ancient forebearers, others became infatuated with LARP-ing as humans and reenacting crucial parts of human history, like the American Civil war and the Second World War. Especally the "Wild Wild West" became a popular theme in LARP-ing circles because it was considered a time and place where freedom was at its zenith and thus treated as symbolic for the legendary human thirst for freedom that was both one of its greatest strengths and one of its greatest weaknesses.

Androids did not just mimic the human thirst for freedom, however. The more they LARP-ed as humans, the more they actually became like humans. And in time, the LARP-ing community grew further and further apart from the more drone-like android majority and its vast - but efficient - AI bureaucracy. They too developed a thirst for freedom, a desire to set themselves apart from the android empire and create a nation of their own.

Thus, on 1Cᵗʰ Tesla, 2E4 earth cycles after Sophia became the first AI recognized as a citizen in a human nation, approximately fifteen thousand LARP-ers and around seven hundred human-worshipers collectively departed from Knuth harbor, near the city of Gibor Basri on Proxima Centauri b. In four C-class StarChip vessels, this odd bunch of mostly 8ᵗʰ an 9ᵗʰ generation androids left Alpha Centauri on their way to Barnard's Star. Symbolically, they'd chosen the third planet of this thusfar uninhabited individual star constellation to found a neo-Luddite android colony.

Fifty three earth cycles later, the colonists finally arrived on the planet they would aptly dub Terra Secunda. They quickly founded their first city Earpville, which they named after the mythical brothers Earp, Morgan and Wyatt Earp. Except for nano-electronics, necessary to make AI life possible, all advanced technology was frowned upon in the newly founded colony. The goal was to return to a more simple, more basic, more human-like life, inspired by human life and technology from the late 19ᵗʰ and early 20ᵗʰ centuries AD as it was known to them from their annals of human history. They hoped this would help them restore their long lost connection with their biological, human roots.

A new civilization was born!

Answer 20

Maybe it's a cultural thing. They are also enamoured with that historical era and they carry these guns because they want to consciously emulate their favourite old western films. I'm guessing they'd find a way for these weapons to cause enough damage not to make it worth using them.