Future of Life Institute: 2,400 researchers and more than 100 technology companies from around the world demanded a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons and pledged not to produce them, in a letter published by the Stockholm-based Future of Life Institute.
We, the undersigned, call on world leaders to create a future with strong international standards, regulations, and laws against lethal autonomous weapons. Those that are absent today. We choose to stand tall: we will not participate in or support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons. We ask technology companies and organizations, as well as leaders, policymakers, and others, to join this pledge.
The signatories include Elon Musk's compatriots and DeepMind co-founders – Shane Legg, Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn and some of the world's leading AI researchers such as Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio and Jürgen Schmidhuber. Google DeepMind, the XPRIZE Foundation and Clearpath Robotics were among the tech companies that signed. The Future of Life Institute website also reports that 26 United Nations countries have also endorsed the ban on lethal autonomous weapons: Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Djibouti, Ecuador, Guatemala, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, State of Palestine, Uganda, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. The letter was released today at the 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) organized by the Future of Life Institute. The move comes at a time when leading technology companies are facing a major internal dilemma over the development of AI for military use. In May, about a dozen Google employees left the company over its participation in the US military’s Project Maven – an artificial intelligence program for the Pentagon. About 4,000 other employees signed a petition asking the company to stop contributing to the program. Today’s letter, published in Stockholm by the Future of Life Institute, is not the first open warning about the AI arsenal. Last September, more than 100 CEOs of AI companies around the world signed an open letter to the UN, warning that their work could be used to build deadly weapons. While some companies are calling for a ban on the use of AI in weapons, the field of artificial intelligence will continue to evolve. So there will certainly be some who will try to use the technology in weapons systems. Let's hope that initiatives like this will find a response from world leaders, as with the development of AI, the need for global oversight and regulation increases. Read the letter online _______________________________
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