"World's Artificial Intelligence Experts Sign Pledge Aimed at Averting 'Dystopian Future With Robots Flying Around Killing Everybody'"

Thousands of artificial intelligence (AI) experts and developers have signed a pledge vowing to "neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons," and imploring governments worldwide to work together to "create a future with strong international norms, regulations, and laws" barring so-called killer robots. More than 160 companies and groups from three dozen countries and 2,400 individuals from 90 countries are backing the pledge, which was developed by the Boston-based Future of Life Institute (FLI)... As Anthony Aguirre, a professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz and pledge signatory, told CNN, "We would really like to ensure that the overall impact of the technology is positive and not leading to a terrible arms race, or a dystopian future with robots flying around killing everybody." Signatory Yoshua Bengio, an AI expert at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, explained that the pledge has the potential to sway public opinion by shaming developers of (...) lethal autonomous weapons systems... Other high-profile supporters of the pledge include SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk; Skype founder Jaan Tallinn; Jeffrey Dean, Google's lead of research and machine intelligence; and Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founders of DeepMind.