5 things to know about artificial intelligence and its use

The letter was published on Monday (July 27, 2015), and asks for autonomous weapon development to go under a ban that would prevent the start of a global arms race focused on killer robots.

A group of leading tech leaders, including British scientist Stephen Hawking and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have issued a stern warning against the development of so-called killer robots. And how anxious should we be about warnings issued Tuesday that artificial intelligence could be used to build weapons with minds of their own?

The experts warn that if any one of the world’s major military powers was to begin developing AI weapons, the above mentioned global arms race would become impossible to avoid. However, according to a Human Rights Watch report, current legal frameworks have not yet been updated to reflect this new technological development: “Existing mechanisms for legal accountability are ill suited and inadequate to address the unlawful harms fully autonomous weapons might cause”.

The idea of an automated killing machine – made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator – is moving swiftly from science fiction to reality, according to the scientists.

It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.

He theorizes that the software is less than 50 years away from being developed, but that the hardware may take anywhere between 50 and 100 years to be developed.

Mr Musk, founder of SpaceX, a private space-travel technology venture, also urged the public to join the campaign.

The most challenging aspect of an Ava-like robot is the hardware, said Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and at Australia’s Centre of Excellence for Information CommunicationTechnologies.

Ricardo Rodriguez, an AI researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, also said worries could be overstated. In fact, if the abovementioned ban is not reinforced, we may see our first killer robot in just a few years and the 1.000+ people who signed the letter fear that “autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow”.

Authorities are gradually waking up to the risk of robot wars. Amid the latest protest over “killer robots”, the letter says a military AI arms race could pose many threats.