Musk, Woz, Hawking, and Robotics/AI Experts Urge Ban On Autonomous Weapons

An anonymous reader writes: An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute urges governments to ban offensive autonomous weaponry. The letter is signed by high profile leaders in the science community and tech industry, such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Noam Chomsky, and Frank Wilczek. It's also signed — more importantly — by literally hundreds of expert researchers in robotics and AI. They say, "The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: 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."

Comments

Re:AI weapons == less collateral damage?

[Anonymous Coward]

"innocent"?

You were part of an invading army, the local militia was trying to repel you, and you consider your injured soldiers to be innocent?

Oh wait, I think I misunderstood. You meant that since you can't identify who threw the bomb, you just open up on anything and everything. So it's you that are killing the innocents, with the hope that you will also get the guilty.

That's even more morally repugnant than I first thought!