Experts call for international ban on autonomous weapons

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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.

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