I believe autonomous weapons should not be legalized or even used. In short, they remove what could be considered a very important human element in life, they making killing easy and leave no one responsible. When I think autonomous weapons, I think of the law enforcement mech, ED-209, from the original Robocop and about how brutally Mr. Kinney was killed by it due to what was called a simple glitch. A similar glitch could happen on a drone flying over a peaceful city and cause it to kill several civilians that are just going about their day. Most armed conflicts today do not have combatants wearing uniforms or displaying on their arm what country they are fighting for, most conflicts now a days are similar to gorilla warfare. Can an autonomous weapon tell the difference between a group of children playing outside from a group of armed combatants? Another problem that arises is what is to be done if an innocent civilian happens to be standing next to or behind a target and they are hurt or killed. Accountability is also an issue with these machines. Say a glitch does occur or its gets the wrong coordinates and bombs a school house that is in session, who would be held accountable for that action? These machines also remove the human element from war, this human element is important because an individual can sense how tense or emotional a situation is and can decided what action to take and how to go about doing so. Machines lack this ability and have no emotions, therefore a situation involving a peaceful protest could go horribly wrong because a machine was not able to realize that nothing wrong is being done. Another problem these machines present is what could be called an autonomous weapons arm race. If the US military begins using these machines en mass and continues to develop them, other countries would be more than likely to follow suit. This could lead to corporations pumping out sub quality machines to meet this demand. This could result in unfinished, unsafe, or not fully develop technology walking around in countries across the world. This arms race could put a lot of pressure on many countries and could open up a a big market for such machines. A rebel group could easily get ahold of one of these weapons and use it against civilians or a peaceful group of people.

Blog 5

Having read Pattern on the Stone before last year, I skimmed through most the chapters and did not do an in depth reading of it, I would liked to because of how much I enjoyed it, but work and projects from other classes kept me from having the time to do so. While I did skim through it, I did enjoy being refreshed on some parts of the history of computers and how they work, the logic behind them, the potential future of computing, and did find bits of information that I had missed. My two favorite parts of the books include the Turing machine section and the section on quantum computing. Those are both interesting topics to me and I enjoy learning about both of them. Pattern on the Stone does a brilliant job touching on both of those subjects and makes them easy and interesting to learn about. I did spend a little time going through some wikipedia articles about Turing and I am very excited for the new Turing movie with Benedict Cumberbatch that will be coming out this year. I also spent some free time reading into the recent advances of quantum computing which was a nice way to burn through some free time i had between classes. While I do not know everything about computers and their history or future, I still felt like I knew most of what the book talked about. What I enjoyed most about the book was how simple it is to read, it skips most of the technical jargon and puts it into simple layman terms which is nice every now and then. If I had to recommend this to someone, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that does not understand computers very well and to those that wish to learn more about them. Something I did not like about the book was how fast it glazed over the concepts of logic in computing and the math behind it. The author could have spent a bit more time explaining it more in depth, I feel this because this is a very important element in how computers work and think. All in all this is a very good book and I would definitely recommend it to everyone. I very much enjoyed reading it for a class again and I will probably end up reading it again in the future for pleasure.