Killer robotsWorld’s tech leaders call on UN to ban killer robots
An open letter by 116 tech leaders from 26 countries urges the United Nations against opening the Pandora’s box of lethal robot weapons. The open letter is the first time that AI and robotics companies have taken a joint stance on the issue. “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” the letter states. “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.”
An open letter by 116 leaders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from twenty-six countries urges the United Nations against opening the “Pandora’s box” of lethal robot weapons.
A key organizer of the letter, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW, released it at the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017) in Melbourne, the world’s pre-eminent gathering of top experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Walsh is a member of the IJCAI 2017’s conference committee.
UNSW notes that the open letter is the first time that AI and robotics companies have taken a joint stance on the issue. Previously, only a single company, Canada’s Clearpath Robotics, had formally called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.
In December 2016, 123 member nations of the UN’s Review Conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons unanimously agreed to begin formal discussions on autonomous weapons. Of these, nineteen have already called for an outright ban.
“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” the letter states. “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,” it states, concluding with an urgent plea for the UN “to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.”
Signatories of the 2017 letter include:
· Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI (USA)
· Mustafa Suleyman, founder and Head of Applied AI at Google’s DeepMind (UK)
· Esben Østergaard, founder & CTO of Universal Robotics (Denmark)
· Jerome Monceaux, founder of Aldebaran Robotics, makers of Nao and Pepper robots (France)
· Jürgen Schmidhuber,leading deep learning expert and founder of Nnaisense (Switzerland)
· Yoshua Bengio, leading deep learning expert and founder of Element AI (Canada)
Their companies employ tens of thousands of researchers, roboticists and engineers, are worth billions of dollars and cover the globe.
