Russia is developing an array of autonomous weapons platforms utilizing artificial intelligence as part of an ambitious push supported by high-tech cooperation with neighboring China. The extent to which Russia has prioritized AI in modernizing its military was featured in a report entitled "Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy in Russia," which was published Monday by the CNA nonprofit research and analysis group located in Arlington, Virginia. The report's authors worked closely with the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to produce what the organization called "the first major piece of US research that articulates contemporary Russia's main initiatives, achievements, and accomplishments in AI and autonomy efforts and places those initiatives within the broader technological landscape in Russia." "Russian military strategists have placed a premium on establishing what they refer to as'information dominance on the battlefield,'" the report stated, "and AI-enhanced technologies promise to take advantage of the data available on the modern battlefield to protect Russia's own forces and deny that advantage to the adversary." While there are significant challenges and some reservations toward ceding critical decision-making capabilities to artificial intelligence and away from human minds, trends clearly signal that Russian efforts to introduce these advanced capabilities are well underway.

One of the greatest risks of the next few decades is likely to come from robotic weapons, AI (artificial intelligence) weapons, or lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs). In August 2017 as many as 116 specialists from 26 countries, including some of the world's leading robotics and artificial intelligence pioneers, called on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots. They even said that this arms race threatens to usher in the'third revolution' in warfare after gunpowder and nuclear arms. They wrote, "Once developed lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent population, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."

An open letter calling for a ban on lethal weapons controlled by artificially intelligent machines was signed last week by thousands of scientists and technologists, reflecting growing concern that swift progress in artificial intelligence could be harnessed to make killing machines more efficient, and less accountable, both on the battlefield and off. But experts are more divided on the issue of robot killing machines than you might expect. The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by many leading AI researchers as well as prominent scientists and entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak. "Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is--practically if not legally--feasible within years not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms." Rapid advances have indeed been made in artificial intelligence in recent years, especially within the field of machine learning, which involves teaching computers to recognize often complex or subtle patterns in large quantities of data.

UK robotics professor leading calls for a worldwide ban on autonomous weapons We can't rely on robots to conform to international law, says Noel Sharkey Sharkey is chairman of and NGO leading a campaign to "Stop Killer Robots" Autonomous robots could destabilize world security and trigger unintentional wars We can't rely on robots to conform to international law, says Noel Sharkey Sharkey is chairman of and NGO leading a campaign to "Stop Killer Robots" As wars become increasingly automated, we must ask ourselves how far we want to delegate responsibility to machines. Where do we want to draw the line? Weapons systems have been evolving for millennia and there have always been attempts to resist them. But does that mean that we should just sit back and accept our fate and hand over the ultimate responsibility for killing to machines? Over the last few months there has been an increasing debate about the use of fully autonomous robot weapons: armed robots that once launched can select their own targets and kill them without further human intervention.