Scientists Worried About Potential Dangers Of Killer Robots

"Killer robots" are fully autonomous weapons that are among the topics discussed this year at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Due to the general increase in interest in the field of artificial intelligence, it is the first time when the subject is mentioned at the annual meeting. In the past, there where a focus more on the advantages generated by the advances in the field of robotics, as reported by the website Phys.org. However, the Thursday's session of the international forum studied the darker side, concerned on the hypothesis that autonomous intelligent robots might go to war.

The science-fiction literature and Hollywood movies presented for decades such apocalyptic scenarios. However, various organizations, experts and scientists started to take this threat seriously only in recent years.

The panel in Davos included BAE Systems chair Sir Roger Carr and former UN disarmament chief Angela Kane, as well as a robot ethics expert and an artificial intelligence expert. The chair of BAE Systems declared that the autonomous weapons industry involves already 40 countries and a market of $40 billion.

Campaign to Stop Killer Robots coordinator Mary Wareham, cited by The Christian Science Monitor, there is an increased concern to stop this dangerous technology. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots was created in 2013 as a coalition of non-governmental organizations with the aim to ban preemptively artificial intelligence (AI) weapon systems and fully autonomous weapons.

Among the business leaders, experts and researchers who signed an open letter against the proliferation of these artificial intelligence weapons in July 2015 was also the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. The letter concludes that the offensive autonomous weapons should be prevented by a ban on their development and proliferation in order to prevent starting of a military AI arms race.

 The panel in Davos concluded that the artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached today a point where the stakes are high because the deployment of such systems is highly feasible. After gunpowder and nuclear weapons, AI autonomous weapons could be described as the third warfare revolution.