Pioneers in artificial intelligence are calling on the United Nations to ban the race for the development of killer robots.
In an open letter to the UN, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Alphabet’s Mustafa Suleyman said development of autonomous weapons would threaten a “third revolution in warfare”.
“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. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways,” they wrote.
“We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.”
The open letter will be launched at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Melbourne on Monday. The letter was signed by 116 robotics and artificial intelligence leaders from around the world.
“Nearly every technology can be used for good and bad, and artificial intelligence is no different. It can help tackle many of the pressing problems facing society today: inequality and poverty, the challenges posed by climate change and the ongoing global financial crisis,” said Scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Toby Walsh.
“However, the same technology can also be used in autonomous weapons to industrialise war. We need to make decisions today choosing which of these futures we want.”
This is not the first time experts have warned against the rise of autonomous weapons. A similar letter, signed by many experts including scientist Stephen Hawking, was released in 2015.
The ban in 2015 was opposed by the UK government, who said: “international humanitarian law already provides sufficient regulation for this area”. This is despite experts saying artificial intelligence is humanity’s “biggest existential threat”.