Tag: AI

Open letter: we must stop killer robots before they are built | The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/open-letter-we-must-stop-killer-robots-before-they-are-built-44577

We need to ban offensive autonomous weapons – or ‘killer robots’ – before a new arms race to produce them begins.

More than 1,000 of the leading researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have today signed and published an open letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons, also known colloquially as “killer robots”.

The letter has also been signed by many technologists and experts, including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Talinn and linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.

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A press conference releasing the open letter to the public will be held at the opening of the International Joint Conference on AI at 9pm AEST, July 28, 2015. To watch the streaming of the press conference on Periscope (live or for the next 24 hours), follow @TobyWalsh on Twitter for notification of the stream.

The following is the entire text of the open letter:

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. 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.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exciting and interesting to think about – many Science Fiction writers have explored the subject, and lots of movies exist.

Author Ian M. Banks came up with The Culture, a symbiotic society of artificial intelligences (Minds and drones), humanoids and other alien species who all share equal status. Overall that works out well. If you’re looking for something new to read, check out those books! There are a lot of fantastic ideas in there.

But there are also many other stories about how AI can look good initially and then go terribly wrong. Worth a thought as well… to phrase it in my own words (and I see this in my work): people in tech can sometimes go a tad arrogant about the abilities of technology, and the risks (from little bugs to huge disasters).

See also the blog at the Washington Post, Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’

Tesla Motors / SpaceX chief Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

HAL 9000 imageWhen asked whether his words meant we shouldn’t expect to see Hal 9000 installed on a rocket to Mars, Musk warned that the most dangerous iterations of man-made AI would make the 2001 computer look like “a puppy dog.”

To explain to the youngsters… HAL 9000 is a computer in “2001, A Space Odyssee“, a famous movie by Stanley Kubrick. It was made in the late 1960s. You can find it in good video stores, and it’s definitely worth watching. It’s perhaps a bit slow-going compared to recent movies, but deal with it. Remember that when this was made, humanity hadn’t set foot on the moon yet, Unix and C hadn’t been invented yet, the Internet was a handful of university computers and no web, and there were no mobile phones or any computers in homes. Most households didn’t yet have colour television, many didn’t have television at all. Yet 2001 shows, for instance, tablet computers… pretty slick.