Elon Musk joins call to crack down on killer robots

Tesla founder Elon Musk is joining a group of researchers and business leaders to warn of the potential dangers posed by autonomous weapons.

Musk and the researchers are urging the United Nations to take aggressive action to “protect us all” from the threat of weaponized artificial intelligence, they wrote in an open letter released Monday by Australia’s University of New South Wales Sydney. 

{mosads}“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” the letter reads. “Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales 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,” it continues. “We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.”

Musk was joined by 115 other founders and executives of technology companies, including Mustafa Suleyman, who founded DeepMind, the AI company owned by Google parent company Alphabet.

The Tesla founder has long warned of the dangers posed by AI. In July, he called for AI regulation “before it’s too late,” which later led to a public spat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Advocacy groups have been calling on international bodies like the U.N. to crack down on the development of autonomous weapon systems. According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S., Russia, Israel and China are among the more than a dozen countries working on such systems.