The Future of Life Institute has written an open letter regarding the potential disaster that we could create by pursuing the development of autonomous weapons.
The Future of Life Institute includes scientific superstars such as Stephen Hawking who is the Director of Research, Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, Cambridge University, Alan Guth, Professor of Physics, MIT and Jaan Tallinn who is a founding engineer of Skype.
The open letter states “Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions.”
The warning is that the technology for this is years, not decades away and an autonomous arms race is inevitable once any global military power develops autonomous weapons.
“Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no cost or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce.
“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, etc.”
The recommendation from the Future of Life Institute is a ban on autonomous weapons, similar to the international agreements against chemical and biological weapons.
Hollywood has taken us down this storyline many times. There have been so many movies on this general topic of intelligent robots or machines that turn against humans that it is difficult to take this warning from the Future of Life Institute seriously.
I keep picturing Will Smith saving the world from iRobots. But it really isn’t that far-fetched. Google has driverless cars.
Apple’s Siri is a simple form of artificial intelligence that millions of people use everyday.
When I think of it from that perspective, we should heed the advice from the Future of Life Institute and stop the autonomous weapons disaster before it starts.
