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Growing Up Online, and Still Bored

Problem is, even with all the added dilemmas that come along with new technology, a lot of these issues essentially feel like the same ones that have always plagued bored adolescents. Kids interviewed in the story talk about depression, bullying, feeling self-conscious about their weight, being mad at their parents, and being unsure about their identity. Parents talk about not really knowing their children, the difficulty in disciplining them, and not knowing what their kids are up to when they’re in the bedroom with the door shut.

These don’t sound like cyber-problems to me, they sound like kids being kids and parents not knowing how to deal. Once an antsy suburban kid myself, I can relate. The fancy computer machines may complicate things, but is the box to blame for age-old dilemmas of growing up?

Someone should start marketing something like a Pet Rock except call it the Blame Box. It would stand in for that external something or other that holds some super power over kids and if parents could only make that go away their kid would be the most well adjusted human specimen on the planet. Kids as a culture that passes down behavior from one age class to the next year after year do share some of the fault for their problems. Who’s going to figure out how to break the chain of destructive and self destructive behavior from one mini-generation to the next.

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The Terminator prequel coming soon to a battlefield near you, Computer scientists debate what socially responsible researchers should do in an era of high-tech warfare 

Arkin argued that Pentagon planners are determined to create war-fighting machines that eventually will be able to decide – autonomously – whether or not to kill. Since war-bots are coming, Arkin said, computer scientists should help design their self-control programs.

Arkin, who said his work is funded in part by military sources, said that with the proper ethical controls, robotic soldiers could be more humane than human soldiers because they would be less prone to act out of rage in the heat of combat.

Citing a 2006 Mental Health Advisory Team study for the U.S. Army’s Surgeon General, Arkin noted that 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians by unnecessarily hitting them or destroying property. “We could reduce man’s inhumanity to man through technology,” he said.

Except for you know where and a few hot spots in Africa the world is relatively peaceful right now. One wonders if  robotic armies might increase the temptation to settle things on the battlefield rather then the conference table. At least they’ll be ethical robots, unless they’re made by the robot maker equivalent of Diebold.

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