Nailchipper

For those in power, the abstraction that a television screen or computer screen provides is both necessary and dangerous. It is necessary because it allows us to model increasingly complex devices and accomplish ever sophisticated tasks. Dangerous because the ramifications of these models on the real world are sometimes masked or not apparent.

Autocrats and aristocrats have a record of being wildly unaware of the effects their policies have on the average citizen. Mao Zedong is thought to have been unaware of the millions of deaths cause by economic programs, like the “Great Leap Forward”, where millions of people starved in just a few years.

The Milgram experiment, published in 1963, showed us that we are capable of inflicting a tremendous amount of pain onto others, especially when we do not see directly the anguish that we cause.

If you look at the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) rates of different divisions in the military, you’ll see that those who are most removed from death and most capable of inflicting maximum damage are the ones least likely to develop PTSD. Here are the rates of developing PTSD among different divisions in the military.

Army - 6.4%
Marines - 3.8%
Navy - 2.6%
Airforce - 0.8%

Video games have become direct training grounds for the military. The US military developed and released “America’s Army”, a game that is freely available for download and also given out at U.S. Army recruiting centers. This game teaches kids military tactics from an early age and never asks kids to question the moral implications of the actions being carried out in the game. Instead, young kids are exercising their brains and building efficient algorithms for military tactics, which one day might be acted on. Except that beyond screens there will be real death and it will all look the same.

There is a great book called “Ender’s Game” (Orson Scott Card) about a young boy trained from an early age to fight and study the tactics of alien race using realistic simulators, in preparation for future wars. The young boy learns the tactics of the alien race quickly and optimizes his ability to think like the enemy and win battles, but, (I am about to spoil the ending, so it is best not read the rest of this paragraph if you’re interested in this book.) if it is not apparent already, the boy discovers that the battles he lead were not a game; he lead real men into battle and real men died even when they followed his sacrificial orders. The boy at the end falls into a deep depression and for the first time begins to question the motives of his superiors and the “enemy”.

Games like “Simcity” and “The Sims” allow us to develop highly efficient algorithms to manage common routines, and kids are becoming aware of managing budgets at an earlier age. We might benefit by young children playing “Sim City” in the way cities are managed in the future, but what I find concerning that we are also developing efficient ways for killing, and blinding ourselves from its effects. History has shown us that even without the advanced technologies of today, leaders can cause great death by the ignorance of their policies, but what is most concerning is how we’re effectively training people to do just that.