Industry Urges United Nations to Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons in New Open Letter

Today (or, yesterday, but today Australia time, where it's probably already tomorrow), 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries released an open letter urging the United Nations to ban lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). This is a follow-up to the 2015 anti-"killer robots" UN letter that we covered extensively when it was released, but with a new focus on industry that attempts to help convince the UN to get something done. The press release accompanying the letter mentions that it was signed by Elon Musk, Mustafa Suleyman (founder and Head of Applied AI at Google's DeepMind), Esben Østergaard, (founder & CTO of Universal Robotics), and a bunch of other people who you may or may not have heard of. You can read the entire thing here, including all 116 signatories. For some context on this, we spoke with Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and one of the organizers of the letter. Why was it important to release this second open letter?