Technological innovators Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, together with hundreds of researchers, are calling a worldwide ban against AI weapons. These weapons that can think on their own "would not be beneficial for humanity", ABC News reported.
The autonomous weapons can be used to attack targets without the intervention of humans. Despite the potential consequences, there is still an ongoing debate whether these kinds of weapons should be invented and used. Those who are against the creation of this weaponry are afraid of possible ethical abuse by those who want to take advantage of the technology, according to the Business Insider.
The Future of Life Institute, a Boston-based, volunteer-run organization, works on reducing the potential and existing risks that humanity faces in the age of technological advancement. They have recently published an open letter from AI and robotics researchers. "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," accoridng to the Future of Life Institute letter.
The letter concludes: "In summary, 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. 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."
There are signatories supporting the letter. Some who have shown their support - aside from Hawking, the director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, and Musk, Director of Tesla and SpaceX - include Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, linguist and philosopher, Noam Chomsky, executive of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, followed by AI and robotics experts all over the world, according to the New York Times.
