Open letter on Killer Robots

Ruim 116 oprichters en CEO's van bedrijven die zich toeleggen op Kunstmatige Intelligentie en robotica hebben een open brief opgesteld waarin ze de UN oproepen de ontwikkeling van Killer Robots te stoppen. Als deze nieuwe generatie wapens eenmaal is ontwikkeld zal er geen weg terug meer zijn en de risico's dat dit type wapen gebruikt gaat worden door dictators en terroristen is veel te groot.

Ik betwijfel of deze oproep zal worden gehonoreerd. Eerdere pogingen tot een moratorium leden schipbreuk. Het probleem is natuurlijk dat alle afzonderlijke componenten van deze zogeheten Killer Robots - zowel hardware als software - in de civiele sector reeds worden of gaan worden toegepast. Maar zorgelijk is deze ontwikkeling zeker en dat is een geweldig understatement.

Tot de ondertekenaars behoren onder anderen:

• Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI (USA)
• Mustafa Suleyman, founder and Head of Applied AI at Google’s DeepMind (UK)
• Esben Østergaard, founder & CTO of Universal Robotics (Denmark)
• Jerome Monceaux, founder of Aldebaran Robotics, makers of Nao and Pepper robots (France)
• Jü​rgen Schmidhuber, leading deep learning expert and founder of Nnaisense (Switzerland)
• Yoshua Bengio, leading deep learning expert and founder of Element AI (Canada)

An Open Letter to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons

As companies building the technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm.

We warmly welcome the decision of the UN's Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to establish a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. Many of our researchers and engineers are eager to offer technical advice to your deliberations.

We commend the appointment of Ambassador Armandeep Singh Gilll of India as chair of the GGE. We entreat the High Contracting Parties participating in the GGE to work hard at finding means to prevent an arms race in these weapons, to protect civilians from their misuse, and to avoid the destabilizing effects of these technologies.

We regret that the GGE's first meeting, which was due to start today, has been cancelled due to a small number of states failing to pay their financial contributions to the UN. We urge the High Contracting Parties therefore to double their efforts at the first meeting of the GGE now planned for November.

Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. 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. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora's Box is opened, it will be hard to close.

We therefore implorte the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.