LONDON: Over a 1,000 stalwarts from the world of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) including icons like Stephen Hawking, technologist Elon Musk, philosopher Noam Chomsky and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed a letter calling for a blanket ban on killer robots.
“We believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control,” the letter says.
According to the experts, killer robots select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain predefined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions.
They say that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is -practically if not legally -feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high -autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
It adds: “The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.”
