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| Campaign to stop killer robots London Parliament square (Image: Flickr User - Matthew Stokes) |
Over 2,000 artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics researchers from across the world have signed an open letter calling for countries around the world to halt development in autonomous weapons systems, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao.
The letter is protesting weapons that "select and engage targets without human intervention," listing "armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria," as one of the systems to which they are opposed.
The open letter, announced July 28 at the opening of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence 2015 in Buenos Aires by director of the Center for Intelligent Systems at UC Berkeley Stuart Russell and professor of AI at the University of New South Wales Toby Walsh, has since been signed by many prominent people from within and without the AI and robotics field, including author and Fundamental Physics Prize laureate Stephen Hawking and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
The letter states that development of such autonomous weapons would trigger an arms race, with terrifying consequences.
Read the full story at Want China Times