Directors of AI and robotics companies warn UN against autonomous weapons

Directors of companies involved in artificial intelligence and robotics have sent an open letter to the United Nations. In it, they warn against the development of autonomous weapons and call for action.

Among the CEOs are Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, and Mustafa Suleyman of Google’s DeepMind project that focuses on artificial intelligence. In total, there are 116 signatories from 26 different countries, according to The Guardian. They write in the letter that they feel responsible and must issue a warning, because they are developing techniques that can also be used to make autonomous weapons.

With the open letter they want to ‘prevent an arms race, protect citizens from these techniques and prevent the destabilizing effects of these technologies’. According to the administrators, autonomous weapons threaten to become the ‘third revolution’ in warfare and can ensure that conflicts can be fought out faster and on a larger scale. That is why they speak of ‘Pandora’s box’, which is difficult to close once opened.

According to the paper, the UN recently voted to start a discussion on the subject. That is why the CEOs are now writing a letter asking for autonomous weapons to be placed on the blacklist of the convention on certain conventional weapons. This includes chemical weapons. The Guardian writes that certain autonomous weapons are already in use and cites the Samsung sentry gun SGR-A1 as an example.

It is not the first time that the UN has received a warning on this subject. In 2015, Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School produced a report warning against so-called killer robots. Also in 2009, a committee called for limiting the use of military robots.