MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Monday, founders and lead scientists from 116 tech companies urged the United Nations in an open letter to adopt a set of measures to prevent artificial intelligence from being used to develop autonomous weapons, also referred to as "killer robots". Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, were among those who signed the letter.
Rights group call for adopting international law on #AI in #Autonomous weapons https://t.co/A9YvM2b9Kl #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology pic.twitter.com/6gpY7GLTUI
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) 21 августа 2017 г.
"The key task for countries at the UN CCW Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) is now to determine the type and degree of human control required, at a minimum, for compliance with international law, and in addition to satisfy ethical concerns," the press officer said.
The press officer stressed that the issue should be dealt "with a sense of urgency."
Here's some real-life examples of weapons systems with significant levels of autonomy. None are fully autonomous. Yet. #CCWUN pic.twitter.com/WcZRS0KQFS
— Stop Killer Robots (@BanKillerRobots) 21 августа 2017 г.
Formal talks on autonomous weapons began at the end of 2016 with 123 countries participating in the negotiations. According to Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, 19 countries to date called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems while over a dozen have publicly supported some sort of regulation in this area.
Head of the @UN encourages all member states to deal with the troubling trend of autonomy in weapons systems https://t.co/dLbn2mAk5s #CCWUN pic.twitter.com/yKFs0S08Xn
— Stop Killer Robots (@BanKillerRobots) 13 июня 2017 г.
Monday's letter was made public the same day as the Convention on Conventional Weapons was supposed to start a week of discussions on the matter, but those meetings were canceled because of "shortage of funds" and rescheduled for November 2017.
