Over 100 roboticists and artificial intelligence experts have called for an international ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems.
The call – made at the start of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017) in Melbourne – has been endorsed in a letter signed by the founders of 116 robotics and AI companies who are concerned about their technologies being repurposed to into autonomous weapons that select and engage targets without human intervention.
The letter, which includes Elon Musk founder of Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI as a signatory, states: “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare.
“Once developed, they 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.
“We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.”
A similar letter was published at the 2015 IJCAI conference in Buenos Aires in which thousands of researchers in AI and robotics warned of the dangers of autonomous weapons.
It cautioned that AI has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is feasible within years, adding ‘autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow’.
“Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce,” it said.
Ryan Gariepy, founder & CTO of Clearpath Robotics said: “We should not lose sight of the fact that, unlike other potential manifestations of AI which still remain in the realm of science fiction, autonomous weapons systems are on the cusp of development right now and have a very real potential to cause significant harm to innocent people along with global instability.
“The development of lethal autonomous weapons systems is unwise, unethical and should be banned on an international scale.”
In December 2016, 123 member nations of the UN’s Review Conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons unanimously agreed to begin formal discussions on autonomous weapons. Of these, 19 have already called for an outright ban.
Do we have a robust definition of “killer robots”? For example, is Phalanx within the definition?
Do you mean this Phalanx?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
Yes, let’s go back to killing by knives and wooden sticks, let’s stay Neanderthalers, we do not want to beat IS by computer, we like to send our children to a fair game of trenchfighting against reprogrammed people who abuse religion in all freedom because nobody thinks about their abuse and religion is so strong it does not need any protection. No we never dispute the soft UN keeping the many wars alive, the ongoing deportation of refugees, because this is just trade and daily big business, we even do not want to think at all, we just do not want to loose from something which is programmed to think, like we all are but with quite a lot of bugs. Let’s protest on the street, burn a candle and have a good feeling, we stand for something we do not understand but everybody shouts it is the right way. We follow our leaders who are elected because they look trustworthy, they rely on the voters which gave them a direction.
Isn’t this a century too late?
A land mine is a lethal automonous weapon. Once set it will indiscriminately kill anyone, or anything, that stands on it. Poisoned Punji traps have probably been around for millennia and are equally as indiscriminate.
Besides the above, you can only ban things that other people/countries/terrorist groups would find difficult to make (like nuclear weapons) otherwise the only people handicapped by the ban are those who propose it.
The armed Services of all nations (at most, those who are at the top of each heap) have for several centuries managed to ‘condition’ those below to become completely autonomous. ie Do exactly what they are told, without thought or question. Let’s be clear: if that was not the case, the whole farce would come apart! This scenario might have been necessary and suitable whilst ‘they’ -the surfs, cannon fodder, peasants PBI, GI, were so uneducated that they were unable to think for themselves: and any thoughts they might have had would be crushed. [Anything less is mutiny?] Not only that but the poor ‘s**s’ had to get quite close to each other to attack.
But what have we now? We (and here I have to accept some blame) have created more and more sophisticated and quantity of offensive and defensive ‘hot rocks’. We have even added noxious gases and spores…and pathogens….and nerve disturbing chemistry : the list is endless.
For some reason, those who have ‘signed’ the documents described (as did others before, as did others before, as did others… you get the idea) somehow believe that yet another piece of paper with black marks upon it will stop evil? It never has yet, but at least this time I do believe that the sword (in our STEM hands) may indeed be mightier than the lawyers or politician’s pen.
I am leaving a space below of the ‘leftist, pinko’ description(s) from elsewhere.
We finally have the chance to literally (actually it is 0 and 1 so should be numerically) change the future. Lets not get it wrong, please.
Whilst working in the USA (1967-70) I had an excellent lab technician. He was from the town where we too were living and we knew his family. He was drafted, and after his basic training, sent to Viet-Nam. He lasted a week in combat, before stepping on the item described. By then, the VC had worked out that coating such with buffalo dung had an even nastier effect than just the wound. The young man (who had been quite a ladies man and a dancer) concerned had both of his feet amputated: the alternative was a gangrenous death. This destroyed his life (he committed suicide a few years later) and that of his parents, and siblings. Effective? Not arf -but not where it might have counted the most!