In an open letter signed by more than 1,000 artificial intelligence scientists and experts and 800 other endorsers including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and MIT’s Noam Chomsky, physicist Stephen Hawking and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk caution that “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”.
AI, the letter argues, could make fully autonomous weapons, cheap and easy to mass-produce, such as armed drones, and “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”; therefore, they should be banned before they become a reality.
“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,” the letter, an effort to dissuade governments from developing weapons systems with offensive capabilities that can operate without human intervention, reads.
Musk has previously likened AI to “summoning the demon“, and said that it could be “more dangerous than nukes“. Hawking has issued similarly dire concerns, positing that artificial intelligence could one day “spell the end of the human race“.
The signatories, however, insist that the concern is not with artificial intelligence but rather misuse and abuse. “Take an autonomous car, change a few lines of code and you’ve got an autonomous guided missile,” said Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at the University of South Wales, and one of the chief organizers of the ban letter.
Artificial Intelligence, Walsh believes, could enable a sort of surgical, cleaner warfare. “Personally, I’m very much against technologies that pretend that we can make warfare cleaner and more surgical. I prefer that warfare should always be bloody brutal, terrible and that it should always be the thing of last resort,” he said.
The letter, released to coincide with the International Joint conference on AI in Buenos Aires, notes the benefits and inevitability of artificial intelligence. The group decided to craft the letter and draft signatories when it learned the support of researchers and scientists in the field of AI could help propel such a ban in the UN and Geneva Convention.
“Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people…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,” the letter emphasizes.
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Start teaching ESP to people in groups in different parts of the planet… But beware of the idea from XMen where a robot can have those abilities and are called Sentinels… 😉