UN to decide on AI weapons regulations after experts condemn their development
A UN meeting in Geneva on Monday will be closely watched by the global defence industry as government officials from around the world gather to discuss whether or not to regulate killer robots after artificial intelligence experts have condemned their development.
Government ministers were set to discuss how best to regulate the systems in lethal AI weapons including, ships, tanks, planes and firearms that are powered autonomously without human intervention.
Although fully autonomous weapons still haven’t been developed, military officials say it’s only a matter of years as semi-autonomous weapons were already being used by countries such as China, France, Israel, the UK and the US.
Recently, a university in South Korea started a research centre aimed at developing “AI-based” missiles, submarines and quadcopters by the end of 2018.
According to CNN, more than 50 leading AI experts announced that they would boycott the research.
“At a time when the United Nations is discussing how to contain the threat posed to international security by autonomous weapons, it is regrettable that a prestigious institution like KAIST looks to accelerate the arms race to develop such weapons,” the experts wrote in the letter.
According to the experts, these developments held the potential to lead to a “third revolution” in modern warfare, something they considered to be devastating, as wars could be fought faster and on a greater scale than ever before, not to mention the possibility of the weapons ending up in the wrong hands and being used by despots and terrorists on innocent civilians.
Many experts are worried about the risks of leaving decisions down to the technology when the creators don’t even know exactly how the algorithms work and also noted that delegating the decision of life or death down to the machine implies that no one is accountable in the case of a malfunction or a problem like a misinterpretation of its facial recognition software.