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This AI Must Be Stopped.
Why tech experts are signing a petition against it
Let us ponder a moral question for just a moment. Is it right for an unthinking, unfeeling object to take a human life? That is to say, should the decision of life or death fall into the hands of an object which has no understanding of life and its value? We’re not talking about a gun which must be wielded by a person to cause harm. We’re talking about a weapon which can act of its own accord, an algorithm which can end people’s lives with blood-curdling accuracy. When put in such a way it sounds far too similar to the 1980’s Terminator franchise which depicted humanoid robots in combat with humanity. A science-fiction tale set deep into the cybernetic future where artificial intelligence has run mad and rules with impunity.
But this is not a problem of tomorrow. It is one of today.
The first mass-produced weapons with autonomous capabilities surfaced during WW2 in the form of homing torpedos and air defense combat systems, but it is thought that the first real modern use of this autonomous weapon technology was in March of 2020 during a drone airstrike in Libya. Machines hunted down members of the Libyan National Army, causing sensational outbursts which compared the autonomous drone technology to the aforementioned Terminator robots. The situation is, of course, a…
