Stephen Hawking, others warn against killer robots

According to various reports more than a thousand artificial-intelligence researchers have cosigned an open letter calling for an international ban on autonomous weapons, or "killer robots."

According to The Verge, they have been joined by hundreds of sympathetic signatories from outside the AI industry — including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, scientist Stephen Hawking, and social theorist Noam Chomsky.

Autonomous weapons capable of attacking targets without human intervention have not been invented or tested yet, but that hasn't prevented fierce debate about their potential creation and uses.

Opponents, like those signing the petition, fear that the invention of these machines would have extremely dangerous consequences for humanity in general, would be liable to misuse, and raise difficult ethical questions.

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point," the letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, reads, "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."

The lettter also goes on to describe them as the "Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," with a warning that "they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce." Furthermore, it also says, "It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group."

Hence, it urges international preemptive action against such technology, saying: "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."

Other notable signatories to the letter include philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Skype cofounder Jaan Talinn, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis (along with 39 other Google employees) amongst others.