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Killer Robots Would Be 'Dangerously Destabilizing' Force in the World, Tech Leaders Warn (washingtonpost.com)
Thousands of artificial intelligence experts are calling on governments to take preemptive action before it's too late. The list is extensive and includes some of the most influential names in the overlapping worlds of technology, science and academia. From a report: Among them are billionaire inventor and OpenAI founder Elon Musk, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, artificial intelligence researcher Stuart Russell, as well as the three founders of Google DeepMind -- the company's premier machine learning research group. In total, more than 160 organizations and 2,460 individuals from 90 countries promised this week to not participate in or support the development and use of lethal autonomous weapons. The pledge says artificial intelligence is expected to play an increasing role in military systems and calls upon governments and politicians to introduce laws regulating such weapons "to create a future with strong international norms."
"Thousands of AI researchers agree that by removing the risk, attributability, and difficulty of taking human lives, lethal autonomous weapons could become powerful instruments of violence and oppression, especially when linked to surveillance and data systems," the pledge says. "Moreover, lethal autonomous weapons have characteristics quite different from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the unilateral actions of a single group could too easily spark an arms race that the international community lacks the technical tools and global governance systems to manage," the pledge adds.
"Thousands of AI researchers agree that by removing the risk, attributability, and difficulty of taking human lives, lethal autonomous weapons could become powerful instruments of violence and oppression, especially when linked to surveillance and data systems," the pledge says. "Moreover, lethal autonomous weapons have characteristics quite different from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the unilateral actions of a single group could too easily spark an arms race that the international community lacks the technical tools and global governance systems to manage," the pledge adds.
>> introduce laws...with strong international norms
Why not structure it like the international mine treaty? You know, the one that pretty much everyone except the USA has agreed to.
(rolls eyes at idea that Russians/Chinese won't use AI-augmented weapons to their full advantage)
The biggest autonomous "robots" deployment is going to be fully autonomous cars. Many pundits are predicting that autonomous cars are the future and once you have autonomous cars, owning a car would be lot more expensive than ride sharing services. They are predicting that US car ownership can reduce by 50-80% and ride sharing services running millions of autonomous cars. Imagine if someone can break into a large ride sharing service and start all the autonomous cars and direct them on pedestrians... It can be far worse than 9/11.