Hawking, Musk, Others, Call For Ban on Smart Military Weapons

The threat of a military AI arms race is so pressing that the world’s governments should ban the development of “offensive autonomous weapons,” Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Noam Chomsky, Steve Wozniak and others wrote in a letter to be presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The letter differentiates between cruise missiles and remotely piloted drones, in which “humans make all targeting decisions,” versus fully autonomous weapons that can fight and kill without human intervention. Many of the signatories have issued warnings before. Musk has said AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” and Hawking called AI “our biggest existential threat.”