Ban on AI Weapons Needed Say Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak

Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Steve Wozniak and physicist Stephen Hawking are among 1,000 robot experts who signed an open letter urging world leaders to ban "autonomous weapons". They fear that having; essentially, deadly robots will be a great loss for humanity and presented the letter at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires.

The Artificial Intelligence weapons that they are talking about are those that work completely without human interaction. This includes things like armed quadcopters searching for people in a specific criterion the letter says, but not something like a drone, which is remotely piloted by humans. The researchers believe that these advancements, if they're allowed to be made, can be created within years.

The researchers fear that once one country starts making AI weapons, others will quickly join in an arms race. This will be a faster race than with nuclear bombs, though, because the materials needed to make robotics are not rare and complicated.

The letter acknowledges that autonomous weapons can keep soldiers off battlefields, and thus safer. Ultimately, they say, the weapons would be used for darker and more inhumane functions.

"Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group," the letter says. "We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people."

Stuart Russell, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, came up with the idea to write the letter. He spoke with NPR's All Things Considered about his reasoning. He explained that not AI is totally bad, but it should be used to improve people's lives, not commit violence.

"There are many things we could do other than making better ways to kill people," Russell said.

Hawking, whom Eddie Redmayne portrayed in The Theory of Everything last winter, has previously spoken against artificial intelligence. In May, he said that full AI "could spell the end of the human race."

Hawking fears that AI could follow different intentions that the users and creators want them to, leading to a sort of I, Robot situation.