“This mechanistic, technical-military psychological attitude has had its inevitable consequences. Every single act in foreign policy is governed exclusively by one viewpoint: how do we have to act in order to achieve utmost superiority over the opponent in case of war?”
— Albert Einstein
Einstein made this statement in a television interview in early 1950.
It was still very early in the Cold War era, and he was speaking about the nuclear arms race. The Berlin Blockade had recently ended, and the beginning of the Korean War was still four months away.
Now, some of the most well known individuals in science and technology are coming together to prevent a different type of arms race: the artificial intelligence arms race.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) founder Elon Musk, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, physicist Stephen Hawking, and a thousand other artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter warning that robots comprise “a third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”
“The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” the letter warned.
This open letter was announced at the 24th gathering of The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and it calls for a widespread ban on “offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”
The fear of “killer robots” turning into a new arms race has been heightening in recent years, and in 2013, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon raised some burning questions:
If their use results in a war crime or serious human rights violation, who would be legally responsible? If responsibility cannot be determined as required by international law, is it legal or ethical to deploy such systems?
The United Nations conference on Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWS) has convened twice to tackle the issue. The most recent meeting, last April, was to begin amending the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), the UN’s legal rules for using force first signed by 120 member states in 1983.
“Over the past two years, this issue has evolved rapidly from the realm of science-fiction to a serious international concern,” United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Angela Kane, said in a video message to the council. “This is fitting given prevailing trends — which include the rapid pace of technological development and the increasing automation of military systems.”
UN discussions on the matter are ongoing.
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This open letter — with over 7,000 signatories and growing — represents the important overlap of academia and enterprise that is a hallmark of the tech industry. When technological pioneers take a moral stand on tech-related issues, the industry is not guaranteed to react.
If there’s money to be made, the market sometimes forces a reaction instead.
And we already know that robots are tremendous job killers. When robots can manufacture cheaper than any available labor force, they become the default choice, and jobs are eliminated. When they are safer and more precise than a human, they become the default choice.
In warfare, the problems are different, and a ban on their use in warfare would leave the door open for legacy war technologies.
In other words, they can creatively destroy a market, but literal destruction could still be off limits.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
