A who’s-who grouping of the world’s most prominent minds has signed onto a letter urging robotics researchers to be extremely cautious in developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, warning that an inevitable military AI arms race could (and likely will) unfold, leading to “a third revolution in warfare.”
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Tesla’s Elon Musk, scientist Stephen Hawking and more than 1,000 others, presenting at the recent International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Argentina, obviously see the writing on the wall: If AI technologies continue to develop unabated, they say, autonomous weapons systems that operate without human input will eventually commit atrocities like mass genocide and ethnic cleansing campaigns.