Most Holocaust movies come packaged in bubble wraps of tragedy.

Some of these films remain one of the most memorable films to us not only because they promote awareness of the events of Holocaust, but also because they remind us what horrid things humans are capable of. “The Boy in Striped Pajamas” is a Holocaust movie.

What kept my mind occupied after the movie were two particular scenes – both of which are related to the use of war technologies.

The movie is about an eight year old German boy, Bruno, who finds a Jew friend Shmuel. Throughout the movie Bruno secretly visits the concentration camp nearby his family’s new house in order to play with Shmuel who lives in the concentration camp. Their conversations and plays always have the electric fence between them, which is meant to separate the concentration camp from the rest of the world. Knowing how ignorant I was of the powers of electricity when I was eight years old, I could not help but feel the sweat on my palms whenever the screen showed the two boys facing the electric fence. What if the kids touch the wire by accident? What if they don’t know what the fence can do to them when they touch it?

Surely, the technology was developed to benefit the German soldiers (cheap security system) and was intended to prevent people from escaping the concentration camp. However, it is humans who give purposes and meanings to technologies/machines/things. Technologies perform its function regardless of whether it is serving the intended purposes or not. This trivial characteristic of technology, I believe, is why the field of roboethics and technoethics is important in this Century. Because of the rising powers of newest technologies, especially of automation and artificial intelligence, the world seems to have give illusion that this fundamental flaw of technology is nonexistent already.

At the end of the movie, Bruno accidentally walks into the gas chamber with Shmuel while helping to look for Shmuel’s father in the camp. It was obvious from the scene that Bruno’s father, the soldier in charge of running the concentration camp, would not have allowed the gas to be poured into the gas chamber if he had known who was inside it. The gas chamber was built with the intention of killing a certain race of people, however the movie clearly illustrated that technology is capable of producing an output regardless of whether the output goes against the user’s intentions.

This characteristic of technology can be generalized to miliatry/war technologies – while many of war technologies are built with the purpose of harming/damaging a select group of people, technology is fully capable of harming/damaging more than that group of people.

In this respect, technology does not have any thinking power. At least not yet. As I have written in Trust from Man to Machine technology does not discriminate against race, nationality, or cololur. Nor does it distinguish normal men from the mental ill persons or ill intentioned people. We are not at the state of reading and analysing people’s minds and mental states with technologies yet.

Generally engineers tend to have a particular user in mind when they design new products. Engineers have reasonable assumptions such as the mental/physical capabilities of the designated users, and their level of ethical/moral standards. Then they build the newest products to benefit that select group of people the technology is built to serve.

But we must realize that once a new technology is developed/created it is never used only in the way we intend it to. Even with highest security and standards regarding operation/ownership of a machine misuse of technology is almost impossible to avoid.

Then let us think about other technologies being developed to help save lives of the soldiers at war. These automated weapons or robotic soldiers are built with the purpose of killing a select person or persons. Are we guaranteed that the technology will be used only by the most trustworthy persons to kill only the select individuals? Or is it possible that the technology built to aim at overseas countries make a 180 degree turn in where it’s aiming?

So far, technology has not been developed enough to distinguish an individual’s qualifications to live. Hence, we must be very careful to pay attention to the fundamental characteristics of the technology before we develop and make use of more powerful technologies.