G1 Animal sidekicks - Sentient, Semi-Sentient or Drones?

[GoktimusPrime]

Being an extension of the primary Transformer wouldn't make them at all sentient/sapient -- at best they'd be artificially intelligent. These components are like an extension of that Transformer's body or mind - kinda like the avatars from James Cameron's Avatar film. Pretenders can feel pain if their Shell is damaged (if anything the pain is amplified); a weakness exploited by Thunderwing when he blasted Bumblebee's shell, knocking 'Bee unconscious without even having to touch him. Likewise Carnivac was rendered temporarily unconscious due to the overwhelming pain he felt when he sacrificed his Pretender shell; and the fact that Carnivac was willing to endanger his shell like that indicates that there's no moral issues arising from the shell possessing any level of sentience (after all, not even Decepticon Target/Head/Powermasters will wantonly sacrifice their sapient Nebulan partners).

Roller and Combat Deck are essentially 'drones' for Optimus Prime, with Optimus Prime himself being the primary Transformer possessing sapience/sentience. Evidence that might suggest a lack of sentience in Optimus Prime's secondary components include:
+ The original tech specs describes the cab/robot as the "brain centre," suggesting that he is the sentient/sapient module.
+ Optimus Prime's G1 TFU profile states that "the Optimus module is by far the most important component of the trio. Although he could survive without the other two, they could not survive without him."
+ In "More Than Meets The Eye Part 3," Megatron destroys Combat Deck's artillery robot with a blast from his fusion cannon. Optimus Prime just shrugs it off and keeps fighting. He doesn't show any emotional reaction to it at all, either at the time or later on. Optimus Prime didn't even flinch when it happened! Either the pain feedback must've been reduced (so like the reverse of what happens with Pretenders), or he's just incredibly good at shrugging off paint ("'Tis but a flesh wound!")
+ In the IDWverse, Optimus Prime was able to transfer his consciousness into Combat Deck temporarily, and then transferred it back into the cab/robot component again.
+ eHobby retconned Roller as having originally been a non-sentient industrial droid known as Barrelroller which Orion Pax used as an electromagnetic lifter. Ditto in the Wings universe.
+ Nobody ever cares where Combat Deck and Roller bugger off to when Optimus Prime is in robot mode! They could back roll into a ditch and noone would check.

So yeah, if Action Master Partners are going to be autonomous components like Combat Deck and Roller, then I'd say that they'd be artificially intelligent but non-sentient/sapient modules. It'd suck if an Action Master felt pain from damage dealt to their partner... (e.g. if Attack Copter or Gatoraider were damaged, would Over-Run and Krok feel their pain?).

Having said that, there's at least one arguably 2 pieces of canonical evidence I can think of that might suggest the contrary about Optimus Prime:
1) In "Attack of the Autobots," the Autobots had to attach attitude exchangers to all of Optimus Prime's components, not just the Prime module. Does this mean that Prime's consciousness is spread among his three components? If so that would contradict the events of MTMTE#3 (of course, the G1 cartoon is chock full of continuity contradictions )... otherwise we could theorise that while it's only Optimus who's sentient/sapient, the other components themselves were still fueled with "evil energy" and needed the attitude exchanger to convert their fuel to "good."
Or this: http://www.scaryforkids.com/pics/kru...e-clown-14.jpg
2) In the IDWverse, Orion Pax knew another Autobot called Roller. But whether that Autobot became Optimus Prime's Roller or if he was just an Autobot who coincidentally has the same name as Optimus Prime's scout component (or maybe Prime named his scout car after him as a tribute?) is unknown. There's nothing to say that an Action Master partner can't be fully sapient... but there just doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence to state that they are.

[Sky Shadow]

Soundwave's cassettes are horcruxes - every time he kills an Autobot he puts part of his spark in another cassette. In his Universe profile, Metroplex/Scamper/Six-Gun was another trio like Prime/Roller/Combat Deck in that "Each has a mind of his own, although each essentially has a personality nearly identical to Metroplex and is mind-linked to him and each other. Scamper tends to be more impulsive and gregarious, Six-Gun more belligerent. The three minds together can be considered units of a single, larger mind, although Metroplex's mind is clearly dominant." Poor Slammer is just a remote-controlled tank, though.

[BigTransformerTrev]

according to the Action Masters' original lore, after discovering that Nucleon stripped them of their ability to transform, the Action Masters modified/developed their weapons and vehicles as transformable partners.
Also the TV commercial refers to some of the partners as "battle droids," which to me suggests A.I. over actual sentience.

At any rate, TFwiki states, "They display personalities of their own and are sometimes very highly skilled. However, their origin is largely unknown, as is their exact level of sentience."

It does raise the question of if this is the case, why was the likes of Push-Button programmed to have pretty much the polar-opposite personality that would be required for the tasks he has to perform such as debugging Mainframe's programs. If he was programmed with A.I, wouldn't they have given him a personality complimentary to his assigned task? It seems more likely that he is his own bot with personality and spark, and just got lumbered with a job that he didn't want to do.

In his Universe profile, Metroplex/Scamper/Six-Gun was another trio like Prime/Roller/Combat Deck in that "Each has a mind of his own, although each essentially has a personality nearly identical to Metroplex and is mind-linked to him and each other. Scamper tends to be more impulsive and gregarious, Six-Gun more belligerent. The three minds together can be considered units of a single, larger mind, although Metroplex's mind is clearly dominant."

I was dissapointed to see Scamper portrayed simply as a drone in the Ironhide mini-series. I would have loved to see him and Six-Gun actually working around inside Metroplex, maybe as the coordinators of many of his functions as Alpha Trion concentrated on more lofty things as well as adjusting his facial cloth. Both Scamper and Six-Gun got appearances in the G1 cartoon and dialouge (albiet limited). Of course Six-Gun would have to have the biggest TF size expansion EVER for just his legs to become Metroplex's guns - makes Broadsides expansion into an Aircraft Carrier look downright normal.

[GoktimusPrime]

It does raise the question of if this is the case, why was the likes of Push-Button programmed to have pretty much the polar-opposite personality that would be required for the tasks he has to perform such as debugging Mainframe's programs. If he was programmed with A.I, wouldn't they have given him a personality complimentary to his assigned task? It seems more likely that he is his own bot with personality and spark, and just got lumbered with a job that he didn't want to do.

Perhaps Push Button just has an extremely buggy A.I., much like Artoo Detoo in Star Wars ("For a mechanic you do an excessive amount of thinking.") This is why Droids in Star Wars are meant to routinely have their memory wiped, to prevent the droid from developing personality and independence that might override their programming leading them to act against the wishes of their owners (although in the case of Artoo, his lack of memory erasure proved beneficial, but in other cases it proved detrimental, such as in the case of IG-88A whom some might argue became nearly sentient). David in A.I. also developed his own quasi-personality and independence -- although he never did really deviate from his original programming (i.e. to eternally obsessively seek his mother as a simulation of love).

If an artificial intelligence were to become sentient/sapient, this would also raise a whole host of ethical/moral questions - which is most likely why Star Wars Droids are routinely memory wiped. Namely, would that artificially intelligent and now sapient entity be entitled to rights as other sapient beings? This is a question that Isaac Asimov explored in "The Positronic Man" (adapted into the film "The Bicentennial Man") and "I, Robot." In Star Wars, if a Droid were to become sentient/sapient, then continuing to treat them as property would become slavery. While slavery does exist in the Star Wars universe, it's generally abhorred by the "good" characters, yet nobody cares about the 'enslavement' of Droids. Our hero Luke Skywalker and his family happily owned and purchased Droids to work on their farm, and installed restraining bolts to prevent them from fleeing (Artoo was able to bugger off to find Obi-Wan Kenobi because he deceived Luke into removing his bolt - again, part of the higher level A.I. shown by this Droid due to his lack of memory erasure).

But I would argue that despite everything that Artoo's been through, while he may be sentient, I don't think he's sapient. Artoo's the one character that's witnessed the entire saga from beginning to end - from when Anakin was slave boy to his rise as a Jedi to his fall as a Sith. If he were sapient, surely he would've figured some things out and mentioned it to Luke! ("Dude, I think Vader's your father, cos check this out...")