Tech leaders from around the world fear killer robots in the near future
It may just sound like something out of a science fiction movie but it’s not. Killer robots have the likes of Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking warning us how these robots could be fueling an arms race not to mention ethnic cleansing.
Autonomous weapons that use artificial intelligence for selecting targets without the intervention of humans are considered the 3rd warfare revolution after gunpowder & nuclear arms.
They aren’t like drones, which need human intervention and have autonomous decision making abilities and a capacity to act on them.
If any of the world’s military powers push AI weapon development forward, it is inevitably going to start a global arms race.
The idea of a killing machine that is automated, made famous by movies like the Terminator, is swiftly moving from fiction to reality.
The doomsday scenario of these autonomous weapons being picked up by terrorists, warlords or dictators for ethnic cleansing has been painted by scientists.
Even though such weapons have the ability to reduce battlefield casualties, the also reduce the threshold for anyone to go into battle.
Currently there is an appeal to ban any offensive autonomous weapons which are beyond human control.
Elon Musk, the PayPal co-founder and billionaire head of SpaceX has urged the people to join this campaign.
Toby Walsh from Australia was a bit more moderate though. The AI professor from NICTA said that every technology can potentially be used for good & for evil.
Ricardo Rodriguez from the University of Buenos Aires too feels that the worries are being overstated. He says that Hawking believes that an Apocalypse is closing in because of the robots and that AI will start competing with humans soon. But this is not the fact.
Authorities from around the world have woken up to the possibility of robot wars in the future as well. Governments began discussing lethal autonomous weapon systems in May 2014 even though there is a 10 year human control requirement for all automated weapons in place from 2012.
Source: Tech leaders from around the world fear killer robots in the near future
Via: Google Alerts for AI
