Elon Musk And Over 100 AI Experts Are Urging The UN to Ban Killer Robots

Elon Musk and more than 100 leaders and experts in artificial intelligence (AI) have come together urging the UN to commit to an outright ban on killer robot technology. An open letter signed by Musk, Google Deepmind's Mustafa Suleyman, and 114 other AI and robotics specialists urges the UN to prevent "the third revolution in warfare" by banning the development of all lethal autonomous weapon systems. The open letter, released to coincide with the world's largest conference on AI – IJCAI 2017, which is taking place in Melbourne, Australia this week – warns of a near future where independent machines will be able to choose and engage their own targets, including innocent humans in addition to enemy combatants. "Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend," the consortium writes. "These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."