Cyberbullying

Cyber-bullying is the use of electronic communication to bully a person. This form of bullying has become increasingly more prominent with the advancement of the technological era. As a bully, social media has made it easier to torment peers from the comfort of your own home. As a child that is being bullied, it has become near impossible to escape the torment. In the article Cyber-bullying: Taking on the Tormentors, the author elands on this topic by stating "whereas years ago kids could at least retreat to their homes for escape, there is no escape for kids today. Relentless tormenting through multiple technology platforms makes it virtually impossible for kids who are victims to find a safe sanctuary or a few hours of peace away from the reach of their bullies". This leads to all sorts of problems such as an increase in depression amongst youths and even suicide. "In September 2013, 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick jumped to her death from the top of an abandoned concrete plant in Florida after being bullied". It is a shame that social media is used this way. At least in the old days you could escape the torment, if only for a short period of time each day. It is sad to see children loosing their lives so young before they realize that things will get better for them one day. 

AI and Robotics

We have reached an age of advanced robotics. Time and time again we see humans loosing jobs only to be replaced by machinery. In some instances it makes sense, in others, not so much. Robots can do many things that humans can do and some even faster however, something very valuable is lost in the process, perception. According to the article NASA Designs A Robot For Mars, If you stand a robot in a room and tell it to find thew door, it will have a difficult time with this task. Even if you programmed it to know what a door is. Unless you added this specific door into its programming, the chances are it will make an error. As for the question who is more likely to make errors, humans or robots? That question is difficult to answer. Humans make an incalculable amounts of errors everyday but I am uncertain if a robot will makes mistakes if its programmer has not. Using this logic, I would have to say that humans make more mistakes. One of them may be depending too much on technology and not enough on each other, but that is a different argument all together. Again, by utilizing this logic, if an error occurs I would have to say it is the fault of the programmer, as machines cannot act without the programs written by humans. Now if we were discussing something more like the AI in the film I robot, then I could blame the robot. My only problem with this whole thing is that computers and robotics will always malfunction. When they do why must we find someone to blame? What if it was out of every ones control? If drones are sent in to bomb specific coordinates and instead a bracket holding the bomb malfunctions causing the bomb to fall from the aircraft early, who do we blame? Do we blame the operator who put in the proper coordinates? Or do we blame the individual who inspected the aircraft before take off? What if the inspector did his job properly and there was nothing wrong before takeoff do we still blame him because someone has to take the hit? This is the problem with robotics doing human tasks when lives hang in the balance. There exist to many scenarios in which human judgment is undervalued. The article, When Robots Can Kill, It's Unclear who Will Be To Blame discusses this very topic.