The world's top artificial intelligence companies are pleading for a ban on killer robots

An open letter by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries was launched at the world’s biggest artificial intelligence conference, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), as the UN delays meeting until later this year to discuss the robot arms race.

Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, released the letter at the opening of the opening of the conference, the world’s pre-eminent gathering of experts in artificial intelligence and robotics.

The letter is the first time that AI and robotics companies have taken a joint stand on the issue. Previously, only a single company, Canada’s Clearpath Robotics, had formally called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

In December 2016, 123 member nations of the UN’s Review Conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons unanimously agreed to begin formal talks on autonomous weapons. Of these, 19 have already called for a ban.

"Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare," the letter says.

"Once developed, they 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, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close."

Signatories of the 2017 letter include:

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI (US)
Mustafa Suleyman, founder and Head of Applied AI at Google’s DeepMind (UK)
Esben Østergaard, founder & CTO of Universal Robotics (Denmark)
Jerome Monceaux, founder of Aldebaran Robotics, makers of Nao and Pepper robots (France)
Jü rgen Schmidhuber, leading deep learning expert and founder of Nnaisense (Switzerland)
Yoshua Bengio, leading deep learning expert and founder of Element AI (Canada)