Artificial intelligence experts pledge against making killer robots

Although artificial intelligence can save lives, it can also take lives and in order to prevent it from doing this, several AI researchers and various countries have come together to pledge against making autonomous weapons or ‘killer robots’.

On one hand AI can be helpful in diagnosing diseases or maybe help treating them or predicting natural disasters, but it can also help in taking people’s lives as well. Autonomous weapons that can decided themselves whether to kill a person or not are already in process, but big tech names are trying to stop that including Elon Musk.

On Wednesday, the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a firm focusing on the use of technology for the betterment of humanity, released a pledge criticizing the development of deadly autonomous weapons and called on governments and leaders of various countries to prevent it.

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Max Tegmark, FLI President explained, “AI has huge potential to help the world — if we stigmatize and prevent its abuse. AI weapons that autonomously decide to kill people are as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons, and should be dealt with in the same way.”

As per Fox News, 170 companies and 2,464 individuals have already signed the pledge to ‘neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons’. People signing it include big names like Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, cofounders of Google DeepMind, leading AI researcher Stuart Russell and more.

“I’m excited to see AI leaders shifting from talk to action, implementing a policy that politicians have thus far failed to put into effect,” Tegmark said.

Also up till now, as per Fortune, 26 countries have endorsed the proposed ban on killer robots including Pakistan. Other include China, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Djibouti, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, Holy See, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, State of Palestine, Uganda, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

Toby Walsh, another organizer of the pledge said, “We cannot hand over the decision as to who lives and who dies to machines. They do not have the ethics to do so. I encourage you and your organizations to pledge to ensure that war does not become more terrible in this way.”