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posted by takyon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-skynet-is-falling dept.

Over 1,000 high-profile artificial intelligence experts and leading researchers have signed an open letter warning of a "military artificial intelligence arms race" and calling for a ban on "offensive autonomous weapons".

The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.

The letter states: "AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] 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."

So, spell it out for me, Einstein, are we looking at a Terminator future or a Matrix future?

While the latest open letter is concerned specifically with allowing lethal machines to kill without human intervention, several big names in the tech world have offered words of caution of the subject of machine intelligence in recent times. Earlier this year Microsoft's Bill Gates said he was "concerned about super intelligence," while last May physicist Stephen Hawking voiced questions over whether artificial intelligence could be controlled in the long-term. Several weeks ago a video surfaced of a drone that appeared to have been equipped to carry and fire a handgun.

takyon: Counterpoint - Musk, Hawking, Woz: Ban KILLER ROBOTS before WE ALL DIE


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:12AM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:12AM (#214791)

    > Can you really imagine anyone other than the U.S. being the first to roll out this technology?

    Well, most of the mechanical stuff is done - they have tanks and planes and stuff already. Coding is cheap to implement on the scale of military expenditure. High-end servers and supercomputers are available anywhere e.g. China has the fastest supercomputer in the world (don't know whether you would run the control software externally and beam it in or run it internally). Why would US be the first?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:18PM (#214941)

    Why would US be the first?

    Because shitting on the US is how you get up-modded here. Doesn't matter the topic, the US is the only nation capable of doing these things. The Russians and Chinese don't spy on people, particularly their own. They clearly aren't advanced enough to do this kind of stuff. Don't you know that all drones are built and flown by the US? Even though a DIY'er can cobble something together, I'm sure the Israelis can't do anything like that.