Leaders Of Top Robotics And AI Companies Call For Ban On Killer Robots – HuffPost

Founders of AI/robotics companies, including Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI) and Mustafa Suleyman (Googles DeepMind), call for autonomous weapons ban, as UN delays negotiations.

Leaders from AI and robotics companies around the world have released an open letter calling on the United Nations to ban autonomous weapons, often referred to as killer robots.

Founders and CEOs of nearly 100 companies from 26 countries signed the letter, which warns:

In December, 123 member nations of the UN had agreed to move forward with formal discussions about autonomous weapons, with 19 members already calling for an outright ban. However, the next stage of discussions, which were originally scheduled to begin on August 21 -- the release date of the open letter -- were postponed because a small number of nations hadnt paid their fees.

The letter was organized and announced by Toby Walsh, a prominent AI researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. In an email, he noted that, sadly, the UN didn't begin today its formal deliberations around lethal autonomous weapons.

The open letter included such signatories as:

In reference to the signatories, the press release for the letter added, Their companies employ tens of thousands of researchers, roboticists and engineers, are worth billions of dollars and cover the globe from North to South, East to West: Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, UK, United Arab Emirates and USA.

Bengio explained why he signed, saying, the use of AI in autonomous weapons hurts my sense of ethics. He added that the development of autonomous weapons would be likely to lead to a very dangerous escalation, and that it would hurt the further development of AI's good applications. He concluded his statement to FLI saying that this is a matter that needs to be handled by the international community, similarly to what has been done in the past for some other morally wrong weapons (biological, chemical, nuclear).

Stuart Russell, another of the worlds preeminent AI researchers and founder of Bayesian Logic Inc., added:

Ryan Gariepy, founder & CTO of Clearpath Robotics was the first to sign the letter. For the press release, he noted, "Autonomous weapons systems are on the cusp of development right now and have a very real potential to cause significant harm to innocent people along with global instability."

The open letter ends with similar concerns. It states:

The letter was announced in Melbourne, Australia at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), which draws many of the worlds top artificial intelligence researchers. Two years ago, at the last IJCAI meeting, Walsh released another open letter, which called on countries to avoid engaging in an AI arms race. To date, that previous letter has been signed by over 20,000 people, including over 3,100 AI/robotics researchers.

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Leaders Of Top Robotics And AI Companies Call For Ban On Killer Robots - HuffPost