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The AI Arms Race in 2020
The UN says we have entered “unacceptable moral territory”
On the otherwise celebratory occasion of the United Nation’s 75th anniversary in January this year, Antonio Guterres — the UN’s Secretary-General — gave a grim address best summarised by his description of the world as “off-track”. On Guterres’ list of existential threats were the climate crisis, geopolitical tensions and the abuse of new technologies — naming one in particular:
“Lethal autonomous weapons — machines with the power to kill on their own, without human judgment and accountability — are bringing us into unacceptable moral and political territory.”
While states might debate whether lethal autonomous weapon systems (or ‘killer robots’ in the popular imagination) are “unacceptably immoral”, there can be no doubt that Guterres is right on the urgency of the risk: development and use of autonomous weapons are both accelerating, and the stakes — ethical and political — are high.
The world’s military powers have been competing to dominate this new class of intelligent weapons for years, with this AI arms race occurring against a contentious global landscape where an advantage in military AI could make…
