The ability of the Jedi to influence machines goes all the way back to the Jedaii Order. However, the acceptance of it has been controversial due to extreme Sith abuse of this power. The Force comes of life and some Jedi are highly skeptical of the ethics of using machines and the Force together. There are also some who dismiss droids as sentient at all. But the Jedi Order is an evolving one. Between the time of ancient eras, to the prequels, to the time of Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy, things would change.
The ancient Jedaii didn’t hesitate to use their powers with machines. Over time, as Jedi and Sith split, the Sith misused these powers. For the Sith the term is ‘mecha deru’. That said, there are Jedi that still use this power in a more limited fashion. These Jedi were in some cases outcasts, even though it was a natural gift and they used it in a more limited fashion.
Droids: Intelligent Machines and the Force
The difference between Jedi and Sith regarding machines comes down to power. While many Jedi simply refused to bother to learn about droids as inorganic beings, others felt the subject worthy of study. The ancient Jedaii did find ways to use the Force to create cyborg type machines that were not intelligent, for basic jobs.
Eventually, as the users of the light and dark side split and the Jedi order was officially formed, the practice of using the Force on machines faded. This is in part due to the dark siders giving it a bad name. Their goal of absolute control mean they would use the Force to turn the droids to puppets, and even invented the means to forcibly convert people to cyborgs and control them. These in part were used to guard the Sith tombs.
Those Jedi who did risk censure and study droids, machines, and their relationship with the Force, were not seeking power as the Sith did. The Jedi use the Force for knowledge and defense, and this is how their research was used. To learn, not to force control on the other, even if it was a mere machine sentient instead of an organic one.
In SWTOR, Leeha Narezz, a nautolan Jedi, has a group of droids called the Meedees. She believed that since droids going without a memory wipe would become sentient, the next step was to develop Force sensitivity. While the other Jedi doubted this, no one censured her for it.
Jedi and Their Influence on Machines
Unorthodox Jedi
The Iron Knights were droids who had been melded with by the Force sensitive crystalline Shard. The first Shard to do so was named Ilum and all it’s offspring were capable. The merge didn’t turn the droid into a puppet, but instead, combined the Shard personality with the droids original personality.
These were trained by the likes of Master Aquinos who believed droids were sentient life and who himself joined forces with Djinn Altis. Djinn also had an unorthodox approach and taught students like Callista Ming who had a natural aptitude to merge with computers. Master Aquino was actually excommunicated for his radical beliefs, but no Iron Knight is known to have turned to the dark side.
Djinn Altis was an independent minded instructor largely an outcast among the Jedi at the time of the Clone Wars. It was he that trained Callista Ming to ‘merge’ with the machine. He was careful to caution her about this ability to use the force and machiness. Eventually, she would use this to merge with the Eye of Palpatine’s computer as she died from sabotaging it.
Kazdan Paratus had strong influence with machines. He used droids to help pass the Jedi trials and used a exo suit to give more reach to his small size and extra arms. Sadly, he did slip into madness (and possibly the dark side) when Order 66 went down. He used his skill to build a replacement temple on Raxus Prime complete with droid Jedi council members and Force powered Droids defending it. At this point he almost certainly was using the mecha-deru ability, as he was using the machines as puppets, whereas as a Jedi, he simply led his droid troops in battle against the Separatist droids.
Anakin Skywalker‘s gift with machines wasn’t particular encouraged with the Jedi. It’s only hinted at in his amazing gift at building droids and podracers. He was a child slave after all, with little education and little enough time or access to tech manuals to guide him in building things from scratch. He built his racing pod from spare parts as well as C3PO. 3PO’s brain was actually built from 3 verbo brains, all badly damaged in a fashion most mechanics wouldn’t consider possible. He also designed the fastest speeder bike on the planet. His friend used it to win his own freedom after Anakin left.
Anakin’s bloodline being strong as it was, it’s no surprise that this trait passed on to his grandkids, particularly Anakin Solo. As a very young child he was able to use the Force to fix and affect sealed electric components. He and his siblings once walked through a low power force field. He was the critical instigator in the children finding the Corellian system planetary repulsors, and was able to activate and aim it purely with the Force. In this way he became imprinted on the system in a way that prevented anyone else from using it.
Droids and the Force
In the Coruscant Nights trilogy, it’s revealed that Jax Pavan and the other Jedi can see I5-YQ in the Force like no other droid. This is similar to what Leeha Narezz predicted. The droid had, while not Force powers, a signature in the Force unlike other droids. While the droid had experienced memory wipes, he had special systems that allowed him to recover those memories.
The bounty hunter 4Lom started out as a standard ship’s droid, turned thief and then hunter. He teamed up with Zuckuss to understand the ‘instincts’ he had. He did meditate and at one point even had a vision of himself at a future ‘jedi academy’ learning of the Force. This was likely derailed by being blasted by Boba Fett, as even when he was put back together he wasn’t the same.
Dark Siders
When Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader he did build a probe droid with a cybernetic link that was compatible with the Force as part of a rebel trap. Using it, he was able to tap the mind of any rebel who fell into it to search for information on the new Rebel base. He was only foiled by the fact that Luke was the one who responded and was naturally shielded.
Darth Mekhis and Darth Karrid are the types who gave this Force power a bad name. They used the Force to make abominations including the Ascendent Spear starship. Fortunately, both were foiled by SIS agent Theron Shan. But this Sith tendency also extended to their tombs where ancient force imbued machines would attack unwary tomb robbers.
In Defense of Droid and Cyborg
It’s critical to note the difference between the Jedi through the ages and their bias toward using the Force with machines. While ancient Jedaii experimented with caution, later generations feared it too much. We can see the different extremes through the ages.
The Jedi Order of Leha Narezz’s era was skeptical in spite of Darth Mekhis and Darth Karrid’s mad experiments, but did not put a stop to it. Yoda’s Jedi Order flat out excommunicated Master Aqinos and the Iron Knights as a reward for their heroic acts. Luke Skywalker’s order accepted those Iron Knights back. Cray Mingla was an expert in droids and artificial intelligence when she came to Luke. When her fellow Jedi and lover Nichos Marr fell fatally ill, they experimented with transferring his essence into a droid created to be his exact duplicate. While this wasn’t a success, at no time did Skywalker order her to stop.
Evolution of the Jedi and Machines
We can see a pattern in all this. The precursors of the Jedi had no qualms of combining the power of the Force to that of the machine. One thing is certain: while the old Jedi Order considered it unorthodox and disapproved of using the Force with droids and machinery, the new was more open.
Luke Skywalker welcomed in many Force traditions others had looked down on. Among his students were those whose parents and mentors had at least temporarily escaped the Empire due to the likes of Djinn Altis. By the time of Luke Skywalker, much of biases and preconceptions that had been tied to the Code were lost. The key was very simple: a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, the Sith for power. This is the difference between the Jedi use of the Force on machines (which has no name) and the mecha-deru ability.
Sources:
- The New Essential Guide to Droids
- Star Wars the Old Republic: Jedi Origin Story
- Classic Star Wars Escape to Hoth (this would be the 20th of the newspaper strips)
- Children of the Jedi
- The Corellian Trilogy
- The New Essential Guide to Characters
- The Force Unleashed
- DROIDS AND THE FORCE
Droids, Technology and the Force: A Clash of Phenomena (Hyperspace Star Wars Insider 81 Supplement) You can find a copy here. - No Prisoners (TCW novel, does feature Callista and Djinn Altis)
