Last week’s poll: Artificial Intelligence and warfare

In recent weeks, Google cancelled its contract with the US Department of defence to develop a machine vision system known as Project Maven, which would analyse imagery captured by military drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motion and provide data to the military. The company’s employees signed en masse a letter to the company’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, stating that such a project would outsource the moral responsibility for the application of their work to a third party, and that they were not prepared to countenance Google or its contractors building what they referred to as “warfare technology”.

Google’s repositioning is not the first example of pressure being applied to stop AI from being developed for military applications. The Engineer reported in April that a group of academics had threatened to boycott the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) if it were to develop autonomous weapons that could locate and eliminate targets without human control. Whether or not the institution had planned to carry out such research, its president soon delivered an assurance that it would not and the boycott was called off. Moreover, Amazon recently called off plans to sell facial recognition software to US police after civil rights organisations expressed concerns that communities such as people of colour and immigrants could be targeted by such systems. We have also reported on several occasions on campaigns against “killer robots” such as those headed by Prof Noel Sharkey.