More than 1,000 of the World's leading experts in robotics and artificial intelligence have signed a petition calling for a ban on "offensive autonomous weapons" for fears that the world may become engulfed in a "military artificial intelligence arms race."
Some of the signatures on the list include tech industry titans like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla founder Elon Musk in addition to revered academics like astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Philosopher Noam Chomsky.
Future of Life Institute (FLI), the group behind the letter, warns of a bleak future right out of a science fiction film, where excessive military development in AI technologies leads to sentient killing machines becoming the ultimate threat to mankind.
"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."
The authors believe that the race for AI controlled weapons could mirror that of the Atom Bomb. In this instance however, AI devices do not require the exotic materials that Nuclear weapons do, which will make this race near impossible to police effectively.
"The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting."
FLI is not against the development of AI per se, saying it could have numerous positive applications in the future:
In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.