@Hael This doesn't really concern me since Ch'ak only has the most rudimentary of AIs, but I don't see how a machine race being unable to naturally reproduce is a downside. It means that while most races have to copulate, gestate, give birth, and then mature this hypothetical machine race would be able to pump out 'adults' on a conveyor belt. Plus hacking could be rather difficult; you'd have to understand how their programming worked and in the case of a sapient or sentient machine it could take a long period of study before you did. Also, that's assuming they're hooked up to anything that would allow you access in the first place.
You've made a good point with the hacking, but I'm still not entirely convinced that lacking natural reproduction isn't sort of a downside. Afterall, if organic creatures gets stranded on a planet, they would likely be capable of repopulating and spreading if they had enough food. A mechanical race, if stranded, might last for a while but would ultimately not be able to reproduce unless there's a bunch of refined metals and/or mining equipment lying around on that planet. Plus, the factories (or whatever machines are used) to produce the robots would in no way be cheap- they would probably pay themselves off in the long run, but needing to build some for (I assume) most major colonies would be expensive at first, and may even cause debt. This is especially true once you realize that it costs a
lot more money/resources to make a high-tech robot/android/drone (metals, circuitry, alloys, etc.) than it does a baby (which just needs to healthy parents to have sex).
On top of that, then machines lack the ability to heal large injuries naturally overtime. An organic creature can heal injuries if they have food and basic needs met, but for machines who are stranded or separated from the group, unless they have some way of creating new parts/materials to replace damaged parts/materials, then the machine is doomed- and it would probably be a lot harder to find advanced mechanics than it would organic food.
In a civilized area (with mines and factories and such), getting those replacement parts and metals might be fairly easy for a damaged machine, but in an
uncolonized/uninhabited area, that robot can kiss his artificial well-being goodbye.
On the other hand, if you're busy producing more machines, you have to devote a chunk of economy to that, removing the possibility of making something else with that chunk. I'm not sure it's a disadvantage, it's just different. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what the disadvantages of a machine race are. Rust? Complex, non-self-repairing systems that need another being or machine to repair? My imagination isn't used to stretching in this direction. I'm also not really sure what the advantages would be. It's all just different.
Well, that's part of my point. ASTA and Awarak were arguing that, because machines are immortal/disease-immune, then it should be okay for an organic race to be as well. But I attempted to counter-point that machines are so different that you can't really make that comparison at all, which is why I tried to show how machines have some inherit, sometimes negative differences that organics don't have to deal with, and thus that argument is invalid. It's just too different.
But I suck at conveying my ideas, so it ended up becoming this big debate. xD
Now, enough about the damn machines!
Also, hey, we made it past 7 posts. So that's good.
Wasn't
@Isotope the one that said she saw an RP with complex Nation Sheets die after 7 posts?
Ha, take that, you microbial horror! (Kidding, kidding)
Vec