A group of 116 robotics and AI specialists from across 26 countries are calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of ‘killer robots.’
The UN recently voted to begin formal discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks and automated machine guns. In response to this, the group of founders of AI and robotics companies have sent an open letter to the UN calling for it to prevent the arms race that is currently under way for killer robots.
Among the list of supporters is Tesla’s Elon Musk, Alphabet’s Mustafa Suleyman, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In their letter, the founders warn the review conference of the convention on conventional weapons that this arms race threatens to usher in the “third revolution in warfare” after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
“Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend,” the founders wrote. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.
“We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.”
While some may argue the use of AI could be used to make a battlefield a safer place for military personnel, experts seem set on the fact that offensive weapons that work autonomously would lower the threshold of going into battle, and will ultimately result in greater loss of human life. It has also been suggested in the past that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of autonomous weapons is feasible within years, rather than decades.
The founders have called for “morally wrong” lethal autonomous weapons systems to be added to the list of weapons banned under the UN’s convention on certain conventional weapons (CCW) brought into force in 1983, which includes chemical and intentionally blinding laser weapons.
The letter was revealed at the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Melbourne on Monday. This is not the first time the IJCAI has been used as a platform to discuss lethal autonomous weapons systems. In 2015, the conference was used to launch an open letter signed by thousands of AI and robotics researchers including Musk and Stephen Hawking similarly calling for a ban, which helped push the UN into formal talks on the technologies.
