Why do Star Wars ships use LIVING gunners?

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I like to think that electronic countermeasures make it very easy to fool automated Gunner systems and tracking sensors so in time most navies defaulted back to analog systems like having a gunner to adjust for such things.

Another lore aspect with so many actual people manning the guns, at least with the Galactic Empire, is how it fulfilled Palatine's plan. He wanted to tie as much of the populace to his empire as possible, and would make crew requirements jump up dramatically. An example of this is the Arquintens-class Light Crusier. In the Clone Wars, they ran on a 100 man crew. Meanwhile in the Galactic Empire, they required more thay 700 people crewing it. In reality, things like Star Destroyers, and possibly even the Death Star, probably could've run with a fraction of the crew listed, but Palatine wanted everyone serving him and his empire

Taking away that many jobs would destroy the Star-conomy

The most famous gun crew in Star Wars was led by Officer "Hold you fire, there's no life forms aboard." Guys, the plans you are looking aren't alive. Dumping the stuff when the cops are chasing you is Billy-Bob the Redneck level of planning.

Another interesting thought is from Dark Force Rising. When Mara and Karrde are talking about the Katana fleet, it mentions how after it was taken over by the hive virus, there was a large push toward decentralization in control of ships. One of the things that made the Katana fleet so special was the ships needed only an 8th of the crew. So presumably, one of the reasons the Republic and Imperial Ships needed so many crew members, including gunners, was because everyone was terrified of another Katana fleet incident.

I think this would imply that the targeting computer provides a kind of "target envelope." By which I mean, it will keep track of your target, its heading, and speed, and perhaps auto-aim for the center of the envelope of where it could go, taking care of things like leading the shot. However, a living gunner can maneuver the cannons to where their intuition says that the fighter will go, rather than the targeted point. Depending on range, the gunner's intuition of how an enemy pilot might try to evade fire could be as important as the computer.

I always thought it was a way to reduce the damage a droid rebellion could do

Maybe they were nervous because they'd just fought a massive war against a droid army. It's also possible that Palpatine just wanted to keep employment up. Also, people that you're paying can generally be relied upon to take your side in an argument.

Idk they had a strong gunners union?

“Because they love to and like to”

Because droid brains can be EMP'ed, and living humans can't. Furthermore, Han had three separate droid brains wired into the Falcon, and they would quite frequently argue among themselves, sometimes catastrophically. In a combat scenario, you do not want droid brains arguing with each other when you're trying to get them to coordinate artillery fire.

Remember Luthen’s auto turret? Lol

Palpatine essentially banned combat droids under the pretense of "that's what the Trade Federation was into so we're not doing that" and one could assume that would include droid gunners as well.

Short answer, because WW2 capital naval ships living gunners because star wars space battles are based on WW2 naval battles. George Lucas even spliced together battles by using footage from WW2 air battles and naval battles

Both continuities combined with fan theories give all sorts of understandable in-universe reasons for it, from the ECM/ECCM arms race getting so advanced and out of hand that it basically looped back around to the simple basics (similarly to BattleTech) to the Clone Wars causing an aversion to the usage of AIs (and subsequent reversion of AI capabilities) to highly advanced/actually sentient AIs going rogue (IG-88s, Crusader XX-777, the Bakuran droid rebellion, etc.) that, combined with it simply being the Star Wars aesthetic, it's extremely silly (to the point of annoyance with the particularly irritating nerds) to complain or question it. Why are there physical gunners aboard starships, even on the CIS ships where the crew are droids? Because that's how it is. Accept it or move on.

My theory is the large numbers of crew are used in a secondary role as damage control teams.

I had a headcanon. If I had to pull something out of my butt as easily as an Essentials Guide: The manned gun is the air gap against E-war. It's fairly reasonable to assume a universe with droids as common as they are, that many systems are vulnerable to E-War of some kind. We've seen what one astromech is capable of inside a massive military space station. There's no way to hack a manned gun, and you can still have the gun itself have it's own sophisticated guidance systems that are built into the gun itself. Plus, things being built on highly sophisticated mechanical computing is possible, and again, nearly unhackable, but would suit the "mechanical" nature of the Astromech's plug. The Trade Federation dabbled in a fully automated army, and I imagine having "one singular, control ship" is more secure then having lots of smaller, less defensable positions. There's a reason Lucrheulks are flying fortresses invicable to almost all attacks beyond plot armor.

It is because of their aversion to ais, if you want computer controlled guns then you are not that far from ships having computer systems running throughout. They had an ai rebellion back in their past and droids are the upper limit to what they were comfortable with.

If we saw more cyber warfare/droid saboteur action in the Cannon Universe (espically on screen) you could use the Battlestar Galactica explanation of having the Human stop-gap between systems to counter hostile AI and viruses hijacking them during Battle to either disable them or turn them against your own fleet, would of been very paramount during the Clone Wars with capital ship droid brains leading the charge in the Munificents. Imagine a Lucrehulk whose entire storage space had been turned over to cyber warfare systems, give them a decent escort fleet and they'd take down more ships than the Malevolence possibly increasing the size of their escort, maybe even whole planets would fall if everything was networked