When three rather intelligent and wildly successful humans come together to voice a common concern perhaps there is something for us to take notice of.

The three in question – Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking – have lent their voices to an open letter written on behalf of concerned scientists and other parties. That letter can be read in full HERE but the part we will dissect is quoted below from Mashable:

 If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.

The primary concern then is not the development of artificial intelligence per se, but rather weapons systems that can exist without human control:

What the group wants is to prevent AI weaponry from being sold by arms companies. The letter, with more than 1,000 signatures from artificial intelligence scientists and experts and 800 other “other endorsers,” cautions that “starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”

Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, was one of the chief organisers of the letter and is primarily concerned with the implications of AI technology falling into the wrong hands. Take for example a self-driven car that, with a few minor tweaks in the coding, could potentially be used as a weapon. Mashable once more:

Artificial Intelligence, Walsh believes, could enable a sort of surgical, cleaner warfare. “Personally, I’m very much against technologies that pretend that we can make warfare cleaner and more surgical,” he said. “I prefer that warfare should always be bloody brutal, terrible and that it should always be the thing of last resort.”

That last bit may be rather clumsily worded, but the truth remains that the further removed humans become from the gruesome reality of war the easier it will become to fight those battles.

[source:mashable]