As the potential or power of artificial intelligence becomes clearer, the concern about the use of such technology in creating killer robots is a topic surrounded by a lot of debate. Nevertheless, there have been efforts to eliminate such worries. According to Stockholm-based Future of Life Institute, the recent endeavor was the call for a global ban on such autonomous weapons by over 100 tech organizations and 2,400 researchers from around the globe.
Some of the signatories calling for the ban include the founders of leading brands such as Jaan Tallin of Skype, Elon Musk of Tesla, as well as Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman, and Shane Legg of DeepMind. Leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers such as Jürgen Schumidhuber, Stuart Russell and Yoshua Bengio were also some part of the signatories. What’s more, tech companies including Clearpath Robotics, XPRIZE Foundation, and Google DeepMind also feature on the list.
Aside from AI experts, tech companies and organizations, countries including 26 UN members have also joined the list to endorse the ban on killer autonomous robots. These countries include Venezuela, HolySee, Brazil, Columbia, Brazil, Algeria, Ecuador, State of Palestine, Iraq, Argentina, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Egypt, Peru, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq , Mexico , Guatemala, Cuba , Djibouti, China, Colombia, Brazil , Austria, Bolivia , Brazil , Chile, and Costa Rica.
The letter called upon government leaders and government to build the future with strong international regulations, laws, and norms against killer autonomous weapons. Signatories pledged not to support the manufacturing, development, use of trade of such weapons. In so doing, they called for policymakers, leaders and other people to join them.
Stockholm’s Future of Life Institute published the letter at the 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which the institute had organized. Even though the Future of Life Institute has assisted in issuing letters from some of the signatories previously, the recent one marked the first-ever instance where participants had individually declared not to manufacturer killer autonomous weapon systems.
The call for the ban on killer autonomous weapons comes at a period when foremost tech companies are experiencing an internal dilemma whether or not to create AI for military purposes. Away from that, almost a dozen Google workers quit their job in May this year citing its involvement in Project Maven, a US military AI drone program. Furthermore, nearly 4,000 employees signed a petition whereby they demanded the company to cease its participation in the project.
The recent letter is one of many open warnings regarding weapon zed AI. Last year, over 100 CEOs of robotic and AI firms all over the world signed an open letter to the United Nations, whereby they warned that they would be re-tasked to creating killer robots.
Even with such warnings, there appears to be an increasing trend of military activities that are being performed through autonomous weapons. Nevertheless, there is still hope that such efforts on the ban of autonomous weapons will rally global organizations and governments to address the issue as the call for regulation and oversight in the AI space heightens globally.
Source TheNextWeb
