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The raw materials have human-like intelligence obviously, so the question is how little you can get away with removing. The stereotypical servitor is almost non-sentient (barring the occasional horror story about the original consciousness being aware of what is going on), but some of them are able to interact verbally. In Titanicus (Dan Abnett, 2008) there are servitors that essentially behave and converse (briefly) in ways that seem perfectly ordinary. In particular (no spoilers):

- The Governor has a butler servitor that interacts with people in a fairly normal way (and is described as attractive and artful). If I didn't know what a servitor was, I'd assume from its behaviour that this was just a different title for a servant.

- One of the characters has some kind of communications servitor (I guess someone glued a radio to it) that has a name (Obligana), which I don't think I have seen before, and also engages in actual dialogue (although only because it thinks its master desired something).

Now, Titanicus is a somewhat old book and some parts (such as all Warlord princeps being immersed in amniotic baths) have been superceded by later material, but the book is also full of conventional mono-tasked and/or monstrous servitors.

What is the smartest servitor that has been described in the background material? How little can you get away with hindering the higher functions of the human stock? How do we draw the limit between a servitor and a cyborg? It is pretty clear that even the smartest servitors in Titanicus have no independent motivation, so maybe the answer is that removing independent will is the primary criteria for servitorisation.

Servitors are designed to serve and obey.

You can even have them made from regular humans not just vat grown bodies (one of the new-run inferno short story collections has one such servitor made).

So what defines them - servitude. Servitors are made to serve; they are designed to perform a specific function(s). So they will only have the independence and intelligence to underertake those duties. Anything more is a waste.

A cyborg on the other hand, keeps its independent thought. It also doesn't have to be a servant to anyone. It can be a ruling class of Imperial society and heck the upper ranks of the Mechanicum are full of cyborgs

I don't think "servitude" is sufficient to describe Servitors - an Imperial Assassin also lives a life of servitude, but in a very different way from a Servitor. The idea of being mono-tasked is perhaps pretty close to a good definition. Offhand I can't recall any example of a Servitor that can adapt to multiple problems.

The majority of Servitors described in the stories are completely devoid of will and act in ways that could not considered "intelligent" (although some can be seen as idiot savants for their purposed task), but some of the ones in Titanicus feel like they could actually do other things, if they were told to, but perhaps they have just been built in such a way as to maintain that as an illusion. In particular, the 3rd edition 40k rulebook describes servitors as "mindless", but I don't feel the ones I mentioned from Titanicus are mindless - again, unless I am just falling victim to the subtlety of their artifice.

 sigkill wrote:
I don't think "servitude" is sufficient to describe Servitors - an Imperial Assassin also lives a life of servitude, but in a very different way from a Servitor. The idea of being mono-tasked is perhaps pretty close to a good definition. Offhand I can't recall any example of a Servitor that can adapt to multiple problems.

I agree with your first sentence, but the subsequent idea is incorrect. From Eisenhorn:

"Aemos sat in a rear cabin, poring over manuscripts and data-slates. Two independent multitask servitors waited for commands in the crew-bay. The ship had five in all. Two were limb-less combat units slaved directly to the gun-pods and the other, the chief servitor, a high-spec model we called Uclid, never left his duties in the engine room."

"We set down on the wide bay, a twenty-hectare metal platform that overlooked the town. The surface of the platform gleamed almost white in the reflected glare. Heavy monotask servitors trundled out and towed us into a landing silo off the main pad, where pit-servitors moved in to attach fuel lines and begin fundamental servicing. Betancore didn’t want anybody or anything touching the gun-cutter, so he ordered Modo and Nilquit, our two independent servitors, to take over the tasks and send the locals away. I could hear them moving around the hull, servos whirring, hydraulics hissing, exchanging machine code data bursts with each other or with Uclid in the drive chamber."

The first quote offers a "duh" realization: they wouldn't need to identify mono-task servitors unless there were also multi-task servitors.

The second quote has some pretty dense servitor action going on. Mono-task haulers, multi-task pit crew, and then Eisenhorn's named, inquisitor-grade servitors that can clearly take on a multitude of tasks.

Even the idea of "mono-task" can be somewhat up for debate. Is a combat servitor with a gun and a claw mono-task? It can shoot and it can punch. Are those two tasks? Or is it doing the single task of "combat"? If someone throws a blasting charge at it can it whack it back at them? If a corridor hatch is closing can it interfere with it's claw and hold it up? If you need it to fire its weapon at specific intervals in order to conceal the noise of you doing something else, can it achieve that task, since it can do the shoot task, or can it not because that subterfuge isn't the combat task?

 Overread wrote:
So what defines them - servitude. Servitors are made to serve; they are designed to perform a specific function(s). So they will only have the independence and intelligence to underertake those duties. Anything more is a waste.

That does not follow. If it's easier to produce a generic servitor that can perform many menial duties than it is to produce a candle-lighter servitor, the generic one will suffice, even if it is only assigned the task of candle-lighting.

Klapaucius wrote:

 Overread wrote:
So what defines them - servitude. Servitors are made to serve; they are designed to perform a specific function(s). So they will only have the independence and intelligence to underertake those duties. Anything more is a waste.

That does not follow. If it's easier to produce a generic servitor that can perform many menial duties than it is to produce a candle-lighter servitor, the generic one will suffice, even if it is only assigned the task of candle-lighting.

The Imperium does a lot of crazy things. There's servitors in manufactories who have a single job of affixing bolts into just one panel side of an in production tank.

The key is to realise that the Imperium treats servitors much like we treat automated machines in the real world. Some are single purpose machines made for a singular function. You don't make a hand-drill with a hammer and a soldering iron and a file. A very rich person might well have servitors purely for the function of lighting candles in their grand hallway and ballroom.


Meanwhile you will also have servitors which are more generic jack-of-all-trades machines. With multiple potential roles and purposes.


Again each one will be made to serve its function. The former candle-lighter will be only intelligent and equipped for that role. It won't be adaptive, it's a blunt dull simple machine.
The latter will likely have more adaptability, but not independence. So it will be able to process more complex situations and function in a wider variety of situations. But its still built for a role with only what it needs for the role.

The key is not giving the servitor more than is required for its role; be its role singular or multipurpose; be it for battle or construction, repair or upkeep, serving drinks or lighting candles.

The only useful way to portray servitors is as having grown the same abilities as real world people who have been lobotomized. They are docile and cannot execute long term plans, because they can't really differentiate between this morning and 20 years ago.

When Ansell and Priestley were teenagers, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest received all the major film awards. Dan Abnett was 11. It's about a highly disruptive malcontent who is sentenced to a work farm and ultimately lobotomized. This was definitely a prominent topic for young people at the time.


The entire purpose of any kind of game setting or novel is to edify. That's what's fun about it, being stimulated, and also it has some kind of developmental function. Theres no edification to us IRL from portrayals of servitors as mindless.

In a different Dan Abnett novel, a character spontaneously starts attacking bystanders as a response to stress, and a servitor attempts to tackle him and save people from.bejng shot. In the notorious story Bookkeeper's Skull, a servitor tasked as a child's companion begs his grown master to come back and play with him. This is a very good level of ability to show a servitor as having.

 Overread wrote:
[waffle]

A servitor designed for displaying jewelry and a servitor designed for serving glasses of wine may need slightly different capabilities, but either function may be performed by a single "model" of servitor. It does not make sense for each of those tasks to require a bespoke design. Servitor factories would not have an endless list of custom requests ("This servitor will need to deliver small plates of hors d'ouevres, but the next one has to carry a single giant cake"). They will be manufacturing a certain amount of generic designs. This is also the only way to explain how widespread servitors are; they cannot all be custom jobs when they're so easy to get and use for whatever you need. Therefore, some servitors will naturally have more top-end ability than the task they are assigned to requires.

I agree, not every servitor is a custom job - its the rich or manufactories which will have servitors to perform very limited specific tasks. The rich showing off; whilst factories just need a servitor to do the same thing on a production line with no variation nor innovation.



But even the generic general purpose ones will only have the intelligence or allowed freedom to work within their designated role.

I guess another way to think of it is like a "shut in syndrome". Even if the servitor could do more things; its programming shuts it all behind restrictions.

They are only given/allowed what they need to function. There's no independent thinking; no desire to improve or change, innovate or adjust.

The idea of "shut-in" is interesting. My understanding is that this would be a situation where the mind is relatively un-hampered in its intellectual capabilities, but certain blocks are put in place that prevents it from thinking in certain ways (e.g. being independent). This might be useful for Servitors that operate in an analyst role (as separate from cogitator Servitors, that just do number crunching without any analytical ability - that's a different thing). Are there any examples of such Servitors in the books?

I understand the literary role that Servitors were/are supposed to serve, but I do find it interesting how narrative devices in 40k develop beyond their original role, due to the sheer amount of material that is produced.

A lot of it isn't just "going beyond their original role" but rather simply the natural fact of a setting built on a whole Galaxy of variety. You have core concepts which then get explored and developed because of the huge variety of situations, setups and such that are present.

Plus the fact that the tabletop can't make anything near as much variety as there would really be in the setting and lore itself.