Wozniak, Hawking, and Musk Warn Military Against Using Artificial Intelligence

A cabal of over 1,000 experts in the field of computing, engineering, artificial intelligence, and even prominent officers in the US Army, have signed an open letter, hosted by the Future of Life Institute, imploring the military to deprioritise its implementation of artificial intelligence. The signatories of the letter, entitled Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence, believe that "intelligent agents," or "systems that perceive and act in some environment," are not yet compatible with current AI technology, and that the social benefits of AI should be examined and tested further before military use is explored. The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI. Such considerations motivated the AAAI 2008-09 Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures and other projects on AI impacts, and constitute a significant expansion of the field of AI itself, which up to now has focused largely on techniques that are neutral with respect to purpose. We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.