Hollywood fantasy: The reality of AI development is a little more nuanced and a lot less advanced than movies might have us believe. Photo: Supplied

It's the theme of so many dystopian sci-fi books and movies: a super intelligent machine in charge of lethal military hardware becomes self-aware and decides to wreak havoc. But could it actually happen?

At the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Texas last month, a workshop was held on the ethics of AI development and a panel discussed whether or not so-called 'lethal autonomous weapons' should be banned.

"There are many arguments, legal, ethical, political and technical for a ban," Toby Walsh, head of theOptimisation Research Groupat Australia's research body NICTA and chair of the proceedings, told Fairfax Media.

"One that particularly appeals to me is that [autonomous weapons] will lower the barrierto war. If one side can launch an attack, without fear of bodies cominghome, then it is much easier to slip into battle," Professor Walsh said.

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While the advent of drones might already have the bar falling, those in favour of a ban would look to stop a potential arms race in "killer robots" before it begins. One the other hand, there are plenty of voices against a ban.

"Machines are not inherently dangerous", said Francesca Rossi, president of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and a participant in the AAAI panel, who points out the huge difference between super-intelligence and sentience.

"We should build [autonomous weapons]by specifying all the relevant context for the desired goal to be achieved by the machine. Otherwise, a goal could be reached by violating some basic assumptions on how we want a machine to behave. Since machines are not sentient, their behaviour depends on how a human built them,"Professor Rossi said.

The specification of "all" relevant context could prove a troublesome task, however, since as Professor Walsh points out, "many ethical principles that we holdas universal are not", and ethics and decision-making processes across different cultures vary.

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Artificial intelligence could encourage war, experts fear