Automation - jeremygillespie/empire GitHub Wiki

Why not replace all the humans with robots?

If The God-Emperor is so powerful, why can’t he just make better, more subservient versions of his subjects? That way he wouldn’t have to deal with politics and sociology, and our sci-fi universe would be boring.

The answer is essentially the same as it is in the real world: He’s trying, but humans are nothing if not persistent. Societal inequality has reached unimaginable, exponential heights, but it’s ultimately still proportional to the scale of society. It’s safer to push the peasantry to the extremities of the galaxy than it is to eliminate them entirely. You can only disappear so many people before someone starts to take notice, and if enough people start to take notice, dissident consensus will develop and spread at the speed of light.

It’s a dynamic equilibrium. The God-Emperor knows, better than anyone else, that it’s not sustainable. No matter how efficient He becomes at suppressing revolution, in the long term the probability of maintaining the dynasty is zero. He has one thing going for Him though: the square-cube law. If He doubles the radius of His empire, the speed-of-light delay is doubled. Therefor, His control over the extremities of the empire is halved. But the size of the empire is octupled. Therefor, the resources it produces, His resources, are octupled. All He has to do is find a way to use eight times more resources to exert twice as much control over His subjects. To present a threat twice as credible.