Drones have already been in use for a long time now. They have been used for carrying out reconnaissance missions and to carry out surgical military strikes. All these drones, though unmanned, were being controlled by a human being. A new short film showing what military drones could look like in the future has been commissioned for an event at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons. This is being hosted by the campaign to stop killer robots.
You can see the video here:
The film shows a fictionalized scenario where a tech company demonstrates and deploys the latest combat drone. The new drone has the capability to recognize good and bad guys on its own. It eliminates the need for human interference and after a little while, the news in the video shows that the drones start targeting politicians and activists.
Stuart Russell, an artificial intelligence (AI) scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, is part of the group that will show the film to attendees. He believes that the technology depicted in the film already exists and will be easier to implement as compared to the implementation of self-driving vehicles. “Pursuing the development of lethal autonomous weapons would drastically reduce international, national, local, and personal security,” said Russell.
The situation is troubling enough on its own. These drones can be produced on a large scale for a relatively small amount of money. The consequences of these drones falling into the wrong hands would be catastrophic. This campaign hopes to convince international authorities to put an end to killer robots and to establish a treaty that bans all autonomous weapons. This would ensure that such technology is never produced on a large scale.
As the technology of this kind has progressed, experts have started appealing to lawmakers as they understand the consequences. This has fallen on deaf ears until now and there has only been an increase in the activity over the course of 2017.
Elon Musk led a host of AI experts while signing an open letter that showed the dangers of such autonomous weapons. This killer robots technology is very real and needs to be stopped before things get out of hand. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments section