More than 50 leading researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics are threatening to boycott South Korea¡¯s KAIST university.
Why is that? Well it¡¯s nothing, just that KAIST is planning to help develop AI-powered weapons for the military.
Organised by Professor Toby Walsh from the University of New South Wales, the group made its boycott announcement ahead of a UN conference in Geneva next week to discuss international restrictions on killer robots. It¡¯s the most powerful move yet from the scientific community, which has long-since warned against the unrestricted development of artificially intelligent weaponry.
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¡°We can see prototypes of autonomous weapons under development today by many nations including the US, China, Russia, and the UK,¡± Walsh said in a statement. ¡°We are locked into an arms race that no one wants to happen. KAIST¡¯s actions will only accelerate this arms race. We cannot tolerate this.¡±
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The reason for the boycott is a KAIST announcement made in February, where it launched a new research center in partnership with local defense company Hanwha Systems. The goal, they said, was to ¡°develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to be applied to military weapons.¡± These weapons would supposedly be able to ¡°search for and eliminate targets without human control.¡±
If that doesn¡¯t terrify you, I don¡¯t know what will. After all, AI creations don¡¯t understand morality or restraint. Forget to include a restriction or two in its code, and a killer robot would burn through multiple villages to get at a single terrorist. And that¡¯s not even considering the times such a weapons system could be willfully misused.
However, KAIST president Sung-Chul Shin denies the allegations that the university is building autonomous weapons. ¡°As an academic institution, we value human rights and ethical standards to a very high degree,¡± he said. ¡°KAIST will not conduct any research activities counter to human dignity, including autonomous weapons lacking meaningful human control.¡±
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KAIST university's transforming DRC-HUBO robot
Whether or not the claim is true, the boycotters are justified in their fears. KAIST is one of the leading robotics institutes in the world, having already won the 2015 DARPA robotics challenge for its DRC-HUBO, a robot capable of transforming from a walking biped to a wheeled machine. Hanwha Systems, meanwhile, is already involved in developing various autonomous munitions for South Korea, including an automated sentry gun deployed to the country¡¯s North Korean border.?
Weapons of war are incredibly deadly as they are. Making these destructive tools autonomous, can be incredibly dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands. Aside from that, using AI-controlled weapons might even let political leaders wash their hands of the violence they cause in their minds, cheaping the cost of lives in wartime. That¡¯s why researchers the development of autonomous weapons should? be strictly controlled by an international treaty. At least 19 countries, including Egypt, Argentina, and Pakistan have declared their support for this initiative. However, others like the US and UK say enforcing this regulation would be impractical, because the definition itself of human control over a machine is hard to pin down.
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