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Article

23 Aug 2017

Author:
Peter Holley, Toronto Star

Tesla chief executive joins call for ban on autonomous weapons citing risks to human civilization

"Elon Musk backs call for global ban on killer robots: 'These can be weapons of terror.'" 22 August 2017

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk... has joined more than 100 robotics and artificial intelligence experts to call for a United Nations ban on... autonomous weapons... “Once developed, [autonomous weapons] will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend.”... [warned] Musk and 115 other experts such as Alphabet’s artificial intelligence expert Mustafa Suleyman... in an open letter... The letter, which included signatories from... organizations in nearly 30 countries... is addressed to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons... The head of the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs [has] noted that...“there are currently no multilateral standards or regulations covering military AI applications.”... According to Human Rights Watch, [the concern] is that people will become less involved in the process of selecting and firing on targets as compassionless machines lacking human judgment begin to play a critical role in warfare... “Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be,” Musk said. “AI is a fundamental risk to the future of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not. They were harmful to a set of individuals in society, but they were not harmful to individuals as a whole.” [refers to Tesla & Facebook]