Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk has joined dozens of CEOs of artificial intelligence companies in signing an open letter urging the United Nations to ban the use of AI in weapons before the technology gets out of hand.
The letter was published Monday the same day the U.N.s Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems was to discuss ways to protect civilians from the misuse of automated weapons. That meeting, however, has been postponed until November.
Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare, read the letter, which was also signed by the chief executives of companies such as Cafe X Technologies (which built the autonomous barista) and PlusOne Robotics (whose robots automate manual labor). Once this Pandoras box is opened, it will be hard to close. Therefore we implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.
The letters sentiments echo those in another open letter that Musk along with more than 3,000 AI and robotics researchers, plus others such as Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak signed nearly two years ago. In the 2015 letter, the signatories warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence in weapons, which could be used in assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.
Many nations are already familiar with drone warfare, in which human-piloted drones are deployed in lieu of putting soldiers on site. Lower costs, as well as the fact that they dont risk the lives of military personnel, have contributed to their rising popularity. Future capabilities for unmanned aerial vehicles could include autonomous take-offs and landings, while underwater drones could eventually roam the seas for weeks or months to collect data to send back to human crews on land or on ships.
Automated weapons would take things a step further, removing human intervention entirely, and potentially improving efficiency. But it could also open a whole new can of worms, according to the 2015 letter, lowering the threshold for going to battle and creating a global arms race in which lethal technology can be mass-produced, deployed, hacked and misused.
For example, the letter says, there could be armed quadcopters that search for and eliminate people who meet pre-defined criteria.
Samantha Masunaga
SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk teased the world last month by confirming his new venture, Neuralink, a company to create implantable brain chips. Now a lot more details have been revealed.
SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk teased the world last month by confirming his new venture, Neuralink, a company to create implantable brain chips. Now a lot more details have been revealed. (Samantha Masunaga)
Artificial intelligence 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, the 2015 letter read. 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.
Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at the Teal Group, said there has been no appetite in the U.S. military for removing the human decision-maker from the equation and allowing robots to target foes autonomously.
The U.S. military has stressed its not interested, he said.
Musk has long been wary of the proliferation of artificial intelligence, warning of its potential dangers as far back as 2014 when he drew a comparison between the future of AI and the film The Terminator. Musk is also a sponsor of OpenAI, a nonprofit he co-founded with entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman to research and build safe artificial intelligence, whose benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
Earlier this year, Musk unveiled details about his new venture Neuralink, a California company that plans to develop a device that can be implanted into the brain and help people who have certain brain injuries, such as strokes. The device would enable a persons brain to connect wirelessly with the cloud, as well as with computers and with other brains that have the implant.
The end goal of the device, Musk said, is to fight potentially dangerous applications of artificial intelligence.
Were going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet you know, like a house cat or something or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI, Musk said in a story on the website Wait But Why.
Musks views of the risks of artificial intelligence have clashed with those of Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg as well others researching artificial intelligence. Last month, Zuckerberg called Musks warnings overblown and described himself as optimistic.
Musk shot back by saying Zuckerbergs understanding of the subject was limited.
Times staff writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report.
Twitter: @traceylien
UPDATES:
2:20 p.m.: This article was updated to include comment from an analyst.
Noon: This article was updated to include information about Neuralink.
This article was originally published at 9:45 a.m.
Read this article:
Elon Musk and AI experts urge UN to ban artificial intelligence in weapons - Los Angeles Times
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]