Elon Musk joins other experts to urge UN to ban artificial intelligence in weapons
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 due to meet to discuss ways to protect civilians from the misuse of automated weapons. That meeting, however, has been postponed until November.
The letter’s 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, destabilising nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.”
Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close
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 that they don’t risk the lives of military personnel, have contributed to their rising popularity. 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.
“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”
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 non-profit that he cofounded 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 person’s 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.
“We’re 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.
Musk’s views of the risks of artificial intelligence have clashed with those of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Last month, Zuckerberg called Musk’s warnings overblown and described himself as “optimistic.”
Musk shot back by saying Zuckerberg’s understanding of the subject was “limited.”
