THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN
PAGE 4 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014
Opinion VOL. CXXX, NO. 27
The Independent Student Newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania
130th Year of Publication TAYLOR CULLIVER, Executive Editor AMANDA SUAREZ, Managing Editor JENNIFER YU, Opinion Editor LOIS LEE, Director of Online Projects FIONA GLISSON, Campus News Editor HARRY COOPERMAN, City News Editor JODY FREINKEL, Assignments Editor WILLIAM MARBLE, Enterprise Editor GENESIS NUNEZ, Copy Editor MATT MANTICA, Copy Editor YOLANDA CHEN, News Photo Editor MICHELE OZER, Sports Photo Editor CONNIE KANG, Photo Manager
STEVEN TYDINGS, Senior Sports Editor RILEY STEELE, Sports Editor IAN WENIK, Sports Editor HAILEY EDELSTEIN, Creative Director ANALYN DELOS SANTOS, News Design Editor VIVIAN LEE, News Design Editor JENNY LU, Sports Design Editor JENNIFER KIM, Video Producer STEPHANIE PARK, Video Producer
GIANNI MASCIOLI, Business Manager CHANTAL GARCIA FISCHER, Credit Manager ERIC PARRISH, Marketing Manager
SELMA BELGHITI, Finance Manager KATHERINE CHANG, Advertising Manager
THIS ISSUE SHAWN KELLEY, Associate Copy Editor JULIA FINE, Associate Copy Editor MONICA OSHER, Associate Copy Editor LEAH FANG, Associate Copy Editor LAURA ANTHONY, Deputy News Editor CLAIRE COHEN, Deputy News Editor
SOPHIA LEE, Associate Graphics Editor ALI HARWOOD, Associate Photo Editor ALEXIS ZIEBELMAN, Associate Sports Editor COLIN HENDERSON, Associate Sports Editor ZOE GOLDBERG, Associate Opinion Editor
SIYUAN CAO is a College senior from Bronx, N.Y. Her email address is caos@sas.upenn.edu.
Failing the Bechdel test SARA, STRUGGLING | The presence of women on the big screen has not progressed much in more than 60 years
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h is weekend I went to see the new sup erher o blockbuster, “Robocop”. The film was everything I expected: a predictable two-hour extravaganza of violence and technology, with a slight hint of Gary Oldman (That is to say, a knock-off “The Dark Knight Rises.”). About 20 minutes into the film, I jokingly muttered to myself, “Oh, look, a female character.” In the 1980s, a comic inspired the Bechdel test. It may have started out as a joke, but this test is at least a standard for analyzing gender inequality in films. I’m not sure if my neighbors in the movie theater appreciated my sarcastic feminist witticisms interjected amongst the robotic carnage. But that didn’t stop me from muttering to myself
through the movie. According to the Bechdel test, a film may be considered to “pass” if it satisfies three requirements. Number 1: The film must have two named women. Robocop passes this requirement by having the wife and then the female bad guy, the right-hand woman of the main bad guy. I was distracted by their hair and am really bad with names. Congratulations. This movie cost literally millions to make, so I’m glad they could afford four female characters. Number 2: The two women must speak to each other. Nope. None of the women even sha re screen t i me. There’s the wife, the evil sidekick, the police chief and the Gary Oldman side-kick. They belong to the men in the narrative, and therefore have no reason to ever converse with anyone but their
men. Sadly, Robocop fails at this step. Had it passed, I’m sure it wouldn’t pass the third Number 3: This conversation must cover something other than men. Think of the last romcom you saw: Did the female characters ever have a conversation about the weather? About politics? Did any of the two female characters discuss work or puppies or the ideal baking temperature for chocolatechip muffins? Usually, no. These women sit around discussing the male lead. Now, as someone who just watched “Valentine’s Day,” I can’t really claim superiority. This test may seem overlysimplified, but Amy Bleakley, a research scientist at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, notes that it has its uses. “I think it’s a start,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a per-
fect test [but] at least it helps get this into the conversation and start the conversation” about the representation of women in films.
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Think of the last romcom you saw: Did the female characters ever have a conversation about the weather? About politics?” Sweden has even started including the Bechdel test in ratings of its films. Bleakley also worked on a study that analyzed 855 films from the past six decades. The findings? Female on-screen presence has not
significantly changed since 1950. Does this mean we’re still living in the 1950s when it comes to the silver screen? The study showed that for every female character, there are generally two male characters. As Bleakley noted, women’s role in society has changed immensely in half of a century — but for some reason, the film industry just hasn’t caught up to reflect these new realities, she said. It gets worse: One of the major changes the study picked up i n d i f ferences among presentation of women on screen is that they have become more sexualized. When these women are on screen, they are twice as likely to be in scenes that are sexual in nature. Recently, Marvel’s Kevin Feige hinted that “The Avengers 2” could lay the groundwork for a solo Black Widow
SARA SCHONFELD movie starring Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanov. This comes right after Warner Bros hinted that we could expect a Wonder Woman movie sometime soon. Is it too much to ask that movies try a little bit harder to reflect reality? There are so many different types of diversity that Hollywood fails at. SARA SCHONFELD is a College senior from Philadelphia studying English. Email her at s.schonfeldthedp@gmail.com or follow her @SaraSchon.
Robots don’t kill people THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE | Building robots that can decide not to kill is a step forward, not a step back
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a st week I at tended a seminar entitled “How to NOT build a Terminator” by Ronald Arkin, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The talk explored how roboticists should approach the ethics of robots with lethal autonomy, especially in light of increased military interest in robotics. Advocacy groups around the world are calling for preemptive actions ranging from a moratorium on robots capable of deadly force to a total ban on robotics research. Especially over the past year, drones have been a constant source of both excitement and fear. From Amazon Prime Air to “signature strikes” in Pakistan, drones have captured the public’s attention. But as a roboticist, it frustrates me that public conversations surrounding “killer
robots” have little to do with actual robotics. So, I’d like to address some common concerns and misconceptions about robots to help the discussion be more productive.
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We must stop assigning moral agency to UAVs or any similarly non-sentient tools. Drones cannot be morally culpable for their actions.” First of all, I’m tired of reading headlines like “When will drones stop killing innocent people in Yemen?” or “U.S. drone struck a wedding convoy, killing 14” or “Drones Kill Civilians using NSA data.” While true in the most technical sense, head-
lines like these confuse the weapon with the soldier. Consider how strange it would be to see a headline like “When will guns stop killing civilians in Pakistan?” We must stop assigning moral agency to UAVs or any similarly non-sentient tools. Drones cannot be morally culpable for their actions. Using language attributing the actions of the operator to the machine needlessly distracts from the legitimate moral and legal concerns surrounding drone strikes. So what about machines that can actually “decide” to kill a human? Some groups like the Campaign to stop Killer Robots have been pushing for international bans on “systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human.” I think their hearts are in the right place, but their efforts are being misdirected.
Let’s examine their largest “problems with killer robots”: 1. How do we maintain control over fully autonomous weapons? Arguably, robots are much easier to control than human soldiers. Autonomous robots act according to very rigid standards, unlike humans who have the capability to disobey orders. 2. Robots lack human judgment required to distinguish between soldiers and civilians. Two words: land mines. Mines are very simple killer robots; they detect their environments, make a decision and actuate with lethal force. My point is not that either is ethical, but the idea of deploying weapons which cannot discriminate between friend and foe is nothing new to military ethics. To direct this critique solely at robots ironically misses the real target. If land mines are too simple an example, consider cruise
missiles. Cruise missiles are the quintessential killer robot of the modern arsenal. The commander on the field gives them a kill mission, and they autonomously navigate to, track and destroy their target. Clearly, we already deploy killer robots which don’t discriminate at all. It seems to me a step in the right direction to introduce robots which can decide not to kill. 3. Replacing human troops with machines makes going to war easier, and hence more likely. I sympathize with this very real concern, but again it’s nothing new. The invention of the musket was greeted in much the same way, as were most new warfare technologies. Focusing all our efforts on banning the tool won’t remove the underlying moral considerations or make warfare more just. Besides, it’s impossible to separate core technolo-
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COLLIN BOOTS gies from their potential for military use. We can’t have GPS without the ability to do targeted remote strikes. We can’t have the internet (a military technology) without the capability for domestic surveillance. The capabilities Dr. Kumar is developing for search and rescue quadrotors at Penn are the same skills required by seek-anddestroy robots. New technologies can always be misused. COLLIN BOOTS is a master’s student from Redwood Falls, Minn., studying robotics. Email him at cboots@seas.upenn.edu or follow him @LotofTinyRobots.
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