Elon Musk calls for ban on killer robots

By Peter Holley / The Washington Post

Earlier this month, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk called artificial intelligence more of a risk to the world than North Korea, offering humanity yet another stark warning about the perilous rise of autonomous machines.

Now Musk has joined more than 100 robotics and artificial intelligence experts to call for a United Nations ban on one of the deadliest forms of such machines: autonomous weapons.

“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” Musk and 115 other experts such as Alphabet’s artificial intelligence expert Mustafa Suleyman warned in an open letter released to the public Monday. “Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.”

“These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways,” the letter adds.

The letter – which included signatories from dozens of organizations in nearly 30 countries, including China, Israel, Russia, Britain, South Korea and France – is addressed to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, whose purpose is restricting weapons that are “considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately,” according to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs.

The letter was released at an artificial intelligence conference in Melbourne ahead of formal UN discussions on autonomous weapons. Signatories implored UN leaders to work hard to prevent an autonomous weapons “arms race” and “avoid the destabilizing effects” of the emerging technologies.

In a report released this summer, Izumi Nakamitsu, the head of the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs, noted that technology is advancing rapidly, but regulation has not kept pace. She pointed out that some of the world’s military hot spots already have intelligent machines in place, such as a”guard robots” in the demilitarized zone between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that have an autonomous mode.

“There are currently no multilateral standards or regulations covering military AI applications,” Nakamitsu wrote.

“Without wanting to sound alarmist, there is a very real danger that without prompt action, technological innovation will outpace civilian oversight in this space,” she added.

Human Rights Watch claims that autonomous weapons systems are being developed in many of those same countries – “particularly the United States, China, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom.” The concern, according to HRW, is that people will become less involved in the process of selecting and firing on targets as compassionless machines lacking human judgement begin to play a critical role in warfare.

The organization says autonomous weapons “cross a moral threshold.”

“The humanitarian and security risks would outweigh any possible military benefit,” HRW claims. “Critics dismissing these concerns depend on speculative arguments about the future of technology and the false presumption that technical advances can address the many dangers posed by these future weapons.”

In recent years, Musk has begun offering increasingly strident warnings about the risk posed by AI, leading some like Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently labeled “really negative” and “pretty irresponsible.”

Responding to Zuckerberg’s criticism, Musk said his fellow billionaire’s understanding of the threat post by artificial intelligence “is limited.”

Last month, Musk told a group of governors that they need to start regulating artificial intelligence, which he called a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

When pressed for concrete guidance, Musk said the government must get a better understanding of AI before it’s too late.

“Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be,” Musk said. “AI is a fundamental risk to the future of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not. They were harmful to a set of individuals in society, but they were not harmful to individuals as a whole.”