Even good robots are scarily unpredictable

The heads of more than 100 of the world's top artificial intelligence companies are very alarmed about the development of'killer robots'. In an open letter to the UN, these business leaders – including Tesla's Elon Musk and the founders of Google's DeepMind AI firm – warned that autonomous weapon technology could be misused by terrorists and despots or hacked to perform in undesirable ways. But the real threat is much bigger – and not just from human misconduct but from the machines themselves. Research into complex systems shows how behaviour can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions. The research into complex systems shows how behaviour can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions.