Prominent artificial intelligence thought leaders, including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, three cofounders of Google’s DeepMind subsidiary, and Future of Life Institute president Max Tegmark, protested autonomous weapons at the 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Stockholm, Sweden this week.
They, along with 2,400 other executives, researchers, and academics from 160 companies in 90 countries, signed an open letter pledging to not “participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use” of autonomous weaponry, which they warned could be “dangerously destabilizing” for every country and individual.
The signatories also called on governments to preemptively ban autonomous weapons.
This is just the latest effort to muster support for AI regulation.
In April, a group of researchers and engineers from the Centre on Impact of AI and Robotics published a letter calling for a boycott of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), which they accused of working with defense contractor Hanwha Systems on AI for military systems. In November 2017, over 300 Canadian and Australian scientists penned letters to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull urging bans on autonomous weaponry. And in 2015, Musk, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and hundreds of tech leaders signed a Future of Life Institute treatise in support of autonomous weapons legislation.
In a blog post in July, Microsoft president Brad Smith also called on lawmakers to investigate issues with facial recognition algorithms and craft policies guiding their use.
But there’s work to be done. A recent report on artificial intelligence and war commissioned by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that because of AI’s potential to “massively magnify” military power, countries will almost inevitably build autonomous weapons systems. That’s why it is critical, those in opposition say, to curtail these weapons through regulation before it’s too late.
