Elon Musk is right: we should all be worried about killer robots

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, along with 115 other artificial intelligence and robotics specialists, has signed an open letter to urge the United Nations to recognize the dangers of lethal autonomous weapons and to ban their use internationally. The letter was released at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017) in Melbourne over the weekend. And although it sounds like a problem in the distant future, Musk – along with the likes of Google's DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman and Jerome Monceaux of Aldebaran Robotics (which designed the Pepper humanoid robot) – is right to be worried about these weapons right now, and so should we. The Guardian noted that according to some experts, the fields of AI and robotics are both advancing so quickly that the reality of a war fought with autonomous weapons and vehicles could be upon us in a matter of years, rather than decades. As such, it's crucial that we understand just how drastically these technologies could affect how governments think about going to war.