Elon Musk Urges UN to Ban AI on Military Weapons
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of aerospace manufacturing company SpaceX, along with over a hundred experts on artificial intelligence has urged the United Nations to ban development of AI in weapons.
Discussions on such machinery, including drones, tanks, and automated machine guns, are currently under way. Some UN officials are considering the addition of robotic weapons to the organization's Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which actually restricts the use of chemical weapons, mines, and other weaponries that may cause "unjustifiable suffering" to the militia and the civilians.
Hence, the elite group of AI specialists from across 26 countries opted to voice their concerns about the matter.
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Through an open letter to the UN, the group highlighted how AI weapons can save the lives of human soldiers yet on the offensive can cause so much destruction.
"Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend," they wrote. "These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."
These 116 AI researchers also urged the UN to act swiftly considering the advances in technology today. It might not take generations to make, only years. Companies like Raytheon, Dassault, Mig, and Bae Systems are currently developing these autonomous weapons systems.
Apart from Musk, Google Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman is one of the signatories of the letter. Executives as well as founders of Universal Robotics, Element AI, and Aldebaran Robotics are part of the group.
According to Element AI's founder Yoshua Bengio, the invention of such weaponry can damage further development of "AI's good applications."
The UN forum was expected to commence on Monday, Aug. 21, but the meeting has been pushed back to November.
More updates should follow.
