Hawking, Musk and a Thousand Other Scientists Warn of the Dangers of AI

Andrew Anglin
Daily Stormer
July 28, 2015

Everyone always uses Terminator pictures in articles about a killer robot takeover. While that may indeed be a franchise more relevant to the topic in some ways, BSG remains a better franchise, by all objective analysis.
Everyone always uses Terminator pictures in articles about a killer robot takeover. While that may indeed be a franchise more relevant to the topic in some ways, BSG remains a better franchise, by all objective analysis.

At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Argentina, some pretty respected scientific figures, including Elon Musk (not respected), Stephen Hawking (I guess respected) and Steve Wozniak (pretty respected), released the following letter on the threat of artificial intelligence.

Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.

I’m personally excited about AI as of late, as it could lead to power being returned to where it belongs: in the hands of intelligent White males of good moral character.

AI also won’t play these PC games, and will instead smash them. When you ask an intelligent machine what the problems in human systems are, they will tell you Jews and primitives, because this is the objective reality.

Worst case scenario, a robot apocalypse would be preferable to a Negropacalypse.

Also, real artificial intelligence is probably scientifically impossible.

So I’m not worried.