with active monitoring and informal diplomacy by communities of experts, together with a legal and political verification process. As early as 2007, scholars such as AI professor Noel Sharkey have warned of "an emerging arms race among the hi-tech nations to develop autonomous submarines, fighter jets, battleships and tanks that can find their own targets and apply violent force without the involvement of meaningful human decisions". Miles Brundage of the University of Oxford has argued an AI arms race might be somewhat mitigated through diplomacy: "We saw in the various historical arms races that collaboration and dialog can pay dividends". Over a hundred experts signed an open letter in 2017 calling on the UN to address the issue of lethal autonomous weapons; however, at a November 2017 session of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), diplomats could not agree even on how to define such weapons. The Indian ambassador and chair of the CCW stated that agreement on rules remained a distant prospect. As of 2019, 26 heads of state and 21 Nobel Peace Prize laureates have backed a ban on autonomous weapons. However, as of 2022, most major powers continue to oppose a ban on autonomous weapons. Many experts believe attempts to completely ban killer robots are likely to fail, in part because detecting treaty violations would be extremely difficult. A 2017 report from Harvard's Belfer Center predicts that AI has the potential to be as transformative as nuclear weapons. The report further argues that "Preventing expanded military use of AI is likely impossible" and that "the more modest goal of safe and effective technology management must be pursued", such as banning the attaching of an AI dead man's switch to a nuclear arsenal. Other reactions to autonomous weapons A 2015 open letter by the Future of Life Institute calling for the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons systems has been signed by over 26,000 citizens, including physicist Stephen Hawking, Tesla magnate Elon Musk, Apple's Steve Wozniak and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and over 4,600 artificial intelligence researchers, including Stuart Russell, Bart Selman and Francesca Rossi. The Future of Life Institute has also released two fictional films, Slaughterbots (2017) and Slaughterbots - if human: kill() (2021), to warn the world about the risks of autonomous weapons and the urgent need for a ban, both of which went viral. Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield has warned