Artificial intelligence leaders urge UN

Some of the world’s leading robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers Sunday called on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots.
Tesla’s Elon Musk and Google’s Mustafa Suleyman led a group of 116 specialists from across 26 countries who are calling for the ban on autonomous weapons, The Guardian reported.
The UN recently voted to begin formal discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks and automated machine guns.
Ahead of this, the group of founders of AI and robotics companies have sent an open letter to the UN calling for preventing the arms race that is currently underway for killer robots. 
In their letter, the founders warned the review conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons that this arms race threatens to usher in the “third revolution in warfare” after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
The founders wrote: “Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend".
These can be weapons of terror that despots and terrorists would use against innocent populations.
Experts have previously warned that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of autonomous weapons is feasible within years, rather than decades.
While AI can be used to make the battlefield a safer place for military personnel, experts fear that offensive weapons would lower the threshold of going to battle and result in greater loss of human life.

Source: Mena