PW Singer on military robots and the future of war

1. What are your take-aways from this video?

2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?
3. What is his/her presentation style?
4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?

A robots revolution is upon us. There is no permanent advantage in war, so the U.S. won't always be ahead. Warfare has gone open-source. Good guys might use them, but so might bad guys. Reinforce the power of individuals against government. There will also be an increase in terrorism. We are taking the moral part out of war. There will be entertainment based on war videos because everything is recorded by the machines. What is the message we are trying to send? We are trying to show our power. What are we actually expressing? We are expressing that we are cowards, too scared to send men in to fight. There is much more potential for "oops" moments. Robots are emotionless, so they don't get upset when their buddies are killed or go off on missions of vengeance. However, robots are emotionless, so they see a helpless old woman the same as a tank: A series of zeroes and ones. Machines can be used for both good and evil. Creativity can build fantastic machines, but part of it that is coming from a drive to destroy each other.

He uses lots of pictures and video of what he’s trying to express. He also makes jokes during his presentation. His speaking perfectly coincides with his PowerPoint. At the end of his presentation, he gives a final thought.

His performance has a light-hearted sort of mood, rather than a grave tone that you might expect for such a talk. However, though he does make jokes at times, he very serious about a lot of the things he is talking about. His presentation did not sound like an essay, and it was not organized according to essay format. He had closing thoughts, but not an opener, and not any real internal structure besides the PowerPoint’s series of slides.

What matters from this video is not that we have this technology so much as the question of what we are going to do with this technology now that we have it. I can personally apply this because when I grow older, this technology will have progressed, and we will probably be fighting machine wars. If I join the military, my experience will be much different than one might expect today; my job might consist of remotely guiding a robot into battle, pressing the buttons I am commanded to press. This applies to education because schools need to keep students informed about things like this; I had no idea about this stuff before watching this video, and I assumed it was just science fiction nonsense. Schools are doing a good job, however, of informing students of the science fiction nonsense that, as of late, is becoming real. Finally, the world can use this new type of war to decrease human casualties. On the other hand, the technology can also be used for evil, and it is almost inevitable that there will be an increase in remote terrorist activity.