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. There are already numerous weapons, like automatic anti-aircraft guns and drones, that can operate with minimal human oversight; advanced tech will eventually help them to carry out military functions entirely autonomously. To illustrate why this is a problem, consider the UK government's argument in which it opposed a ban on lethal autonomous weapons in 2015: it said that "international humanitarian law already provides sufficient regulation for this area," and that all weapons employed by UK armed forces would be "under human oversight and control." I signed the open letter because the use of AI in autonomous weapons hurts my sense of ethics, would be likely to lead to a very dangerous escalation, because it would hurt the further development of AI's good applications, and because it is a matter that needs to be handled by the international community, similarly to what has been done in the past for some other morally wrong weapons (biological, chemical, nuclear).