The letter, published by The Future of Life Institute, states that AI-controlled weapons with capabilities of searching for and eliminating people autonomously will likely be available “within years, not decades”, and describes autonomous weapons as a potential “third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms”.
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Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle.
The Future Life institute, who released another open letter about AI research priorities last January, is hosting the current letter.
The open letter has been signed by eminent personalities, including physicist Stephen Hawking, technologist Elon Musk, philosopher Noam Chomsky, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and hundreds of AI and robotics researcher from top-flight universities and laboratories worldwide.
The warning doesn’t include a call for prohibiting technology like cruise missiles or drones, as those require humans making targeting decisions behind the scenes.
“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”, the authors write.
“Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention”, reads the letter, whose list of signees is quite long. “Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban of offensive weapons beyond meaningful human control”.
The letter also warns of the possible public image impact on peaceful the uses of AI, which potentially could bring significant benefit to humanity. However, numerous great minds Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk-of our time hold a fear of the implications of an advanced artificial intelligence.
Hawking and Musk have already expressed heightened caution regarding AI technologies.
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They are now working to get the issue of robotic weapons on the table of the Convention of Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a UN-linked group that seeks to prohibit the use of certain conventional weapons such as landmines and laser weapons, which, like the Campaign hopes autonomous weapons will be, were preemptively banned in 1995.
