Blog Entry 3

For the third and final blog I will be discussing weeks nine through thirteen.  In week nine we discussed online identity and what people choose to display online.  There are many different ways to display yourself online and some people choose to not display who they really are instead they might display someone that they would like to be. Turkle states, “Why are we doing this?” (p.180) That is an excellent question because why would we do that? I think we should show people who we really are and not try to pretend to be someone. Turkle asks many good questions and some of them simply cannot be answered because everyone is different.  I also learned how other people feel on the topic and how they choose to identify themselves on the Internet.  It seems to me that most people prefer to display themselves and don’t try to display another person.

One video that I watched during week 11 was the P.W. Singer video about military robotics. This video explained a lot about what we would do differently if we had robots going into war instead of humans. Would we take more risks? Would we become more effective? Many questions that need to be answered but we will have to wait because we aren’t sending more robots than humans into war.  It seems to be that robotics will be the future of war. There are many pros and cons about this subject, whether it would be for the better of the country or for the worse.  The pro that stands out to P.W Singer is that they wouldn’t have to tell family and friends about a solider dying out in battle.  That alone I feel would be something very important to limit human casualties.

Another topic that was brought up was if robotics would change the ethical nature of war.  I believe that they would change the ethical nature of war in many ways. The one example I think of is, if we have a dangerous mission to complete. Sending a robot into the mission instead of the human would be less dangerous and we wouldn’t be risking a human life or lives.  With the robot having no feelings it would be easier to send a robot into a mission instead of a human.

My last question is, will robotics be the future of war and will the United States invest in going this path? If they do choose to take this path then the ethical nature of war will be much different then what it is now.