im almost done with the second murderbot book, and im really starting to feel like this futuristic society is kind of crazy for the amount of reliance they're willing to have on these construct bots. like, they fully expect that every single one of these things desperately wants to kill them all and will do so at the first opportunity, and it's not even particularly unheard-of for them to get infected with malware or get free from their own governor modules and start killing people, but they're still hugely popular and get rented as standard security for fucking everything?? and clearly the human expectation of their murderousness far exceeds how much interest they actually have in randomly killing humans, but the humans don't know that, and i simply don't understand why anyone would want to go to work in a place where their safety depends on the tenuously constrictive programming of a heavily armed robot who hates them.
So the first Murderbot book is set on an isolated scientific survey in an otherwise uninhabited area, and the second on a moon that’s not really part of an inhabited planetary system and is instead solely used for mining/mineral extraction and peripheral businesses profiting from the presence of the mining installations.
These turn out to be two of the main use cases for SecUnits: guarding isolated mining installations and protecting exploratory or scientific surveys in uninhabited areas. They’re not used in population centers except in extreme circumstances, and most people would never encounter one outside of inaccurate media portrayals. But the books are set on the fringes of space where SecUnits are used, so it makes them seem more omnipresent than they are in the wider universe.
that's a good point, the books being written from the perspective of a secunit definitely does limit his experiences and the reader's to just places with secunits.
