This week's poll: Artificial Intelligence and warfare

Should artificial intelligence be used as part of weapons systems? Last week, Google cancelled its contract with the US Department of defence to develop a machine vision system known as Project Maven, which would analyse imagery captured by military drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motion and provide data to the military. The company's employees signed en masse a letter to the company's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, stating that such a project would outsource the moral responsibility for the application of their work to a third party, and that they were not prepared to countenance Google or its contractors building what they referred to as "warfare technology". This term of course makes clear what has for many decades been a convenient euphemism: renaming the business of developing weapons and technology for warfare as "defence". The British establishment adopted this figure of speech in 1964, when the War Office – which had existed under that name since 1857 – passed over its functions to the Ministry of Defence. Google's repositioning is not the first example of pressure being applied to stop AI from being developed for military applications.