On Friday — the 4th day of the 4th month — more than 50 artificial intelligence and robotics researchers announced a boycott of a major South Korean university, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 한국과학기술원), after its incipient collaboration with arms manufacturer Hanwha Systems. Critics say that this action will set up a “laboratory for artificial-intelligence weaponry”. According to Rosie McCall, writing in www.iflscience.com/…, KAIST announced plans to begin work at a newly built Research Center for the Convergence of National Defence and Artificial Intelligence with projects that it said would involve AI-styled military tools, such as "AI-based command and decision systems" and an unmanned submarine.
The letter was signed by over 50 researchers based in 30 countries and led by Toby Walsh, a prominent artificial intelligence scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
The researchers — from 30 countries — affirm through an open letter that they will not visit KAIST or welcome their members. They will also not cooperate with its research programs, until such time as the institute shall commit to not develop artificial-intelligence weaponry without sufficient human control.
On Monday in Geneva, Switzerland, 123 United Nations member states will take up the issue of “autonomous killing machines”, which critics call "murder robots."
Open Letter to Professor Sung-Chul Shin, President of KAIST.
As researchers and engineers working on artificial intelligence and robotics, we are greatly concerned by the opening of a "Research Center for the Convergence of National Defense and Artificial Intelligence" at KAIST in collaboration with Hanwha Systems, South Korea's leading arms company. It has been reported that the goals of this Center are to "develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to be applied to military weapons, joining the global competition to develop autonomous arms."
At a time when the United Nations is discussing how to contain the threat posed to international security by autonomous weapons, it is regrettable that a prestigious institution like KAIST looks to accelerate the arms race to develop such weapons. We therefore publicly declare that we will boycott all collaborations with any part of KAIST until such time as the President of KAIST provides assurances, which we have sought but not received, that the Center will not develop autonomous weapons lacking meaningful human control. We will, for example, not visit KAIST, host visitors from KAIST, or contribute to any research project involving KAIST.
If developed, autonomous weapons will be the third revolution in warfare. They will permit war to be fought faster and at a scale greater than ever before. They have the potential to be weapons of terror. Despots and terrorists could use them against innocent populations, removing any ethical restraints. This Pandora's box will be hard to close if it is opened. As with other technologies banned in the past, like blinding lasers, we can simply decide not to develop them. We urge KAIST to follow this path, and work instead on uses of AI to improve and not harm human lives.
Signers include: (Australia) Prof. Toby Walsh, USNW Sydney; Prof. Mary-Anne Williams, University of Technology Sydney; (Austria) Prof. Thomas Either, TU Wien; Prof. Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence; (Belgium) Prof. Maurice Bruynooghe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Prof. Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles; Prof. Luc De Raedt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; (Brazil) Prof. Andre C. P. L. F. de Carvalho, University of São Paulo; (Britain) Prof. J. Mark Bishop, Goldsmiths, University of London; Prof. Zoubin Ghahramani, University of Cambridge; Prof. Noel Sharkey, University of Sheffield; Prof. Luchy Suchman, Lancaster University;
(Canada) Prof. Yoshua Bengio, University of Montréal; Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto; Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia; Prof. Csaba Szepesvari, University of Alberta; (China) Prof. Chao-Lin Liu, National Chengchi University, Taiwan; Prof. Benjamin W. Wah, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou, Nanjing University; (Denmark) Prof. Thomas Bolander, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet; (France) Prof. Malik Ghallab, LAAS-CNRS; Prof. Marie-Christine Rousset, University of Grenoble Alpes;
(Germany) Prof. Wolfram Burgard, University of Freiburg; Prof. Bernd Neumann, University of Hamburg; Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf, Director, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems; (Greece) Prof. Manolis Koubarakis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Prof. Grigorios Tsoumakas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; (Iceland) Prof. Kristinn R. Thórisson, Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines; (Ireland) Prof. Barry Smyth, University College Dublin; (Italy) Prof. Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano; Prof. Nicola Guarino, Italian National Research Council (CNR), Trento; Prof. Bruno Siciliano, University of Naples; Prof. Paolo Traverso, Director of FBK, IRST;
(Japan) Prof. Yoshihiko Nakamura, University of Tokyo; (Lebanon) Prof. Imad H. Elhajj, American University of Beirut; (Luxembourg) Prof. Christoph Benzmüller, Université du Luxembourg; (Mexico) Prof. Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza, Tecnológico de Monterrey; Prof. Raúl Monroy, Tecnológico de Monterrey; (Netherlands) Prof. Krzysztof R. Apt, Center Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam; Prof. Angat van den Bosch, Radboud University; (New Zealand) Prof. Bernhard Pfahringer, University of Waikato; (Norway) Prof. Helge Langseth, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; (Poland) Prof. Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; (Portugal) Prof. José Alferes, Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Prof. Luis Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa; (Slovenia) Prof. Ivan Bratko, University of Ljubljana; Prof. Matjaz Gams, Jozef Stefan Institute and National Council for Science;
(Spain) Prof. Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Prof. Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, Director, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute; (Sweden) Prof. Alessandro Saffiotti, Orebro University; (Switzerland) Prof. Boi Faltings, EPFL; Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber, Universià della Svizzera italiana; (United States) Prof. Marie desJardins, University of Maryland; Prof. Benjamin Kuipers, University of Michigan; Prof. Stuart Russell, University of California, Berkeley; Prof. Bart Selman, Cornell University.
Rich Haridy, writing for newatlas.com, makes note of the gloomy fact that even with the bloated U.S. military budget, there are still Pentagon knuckle-draggers who favour development of robotic assassins:
While 22 nations have already called for an outright, pre-emptive ban on the development of autonomous weapons, several larger military states seem to be delaying any action. Russia, having already revealed its progress towards developing autonomous weaponry, has issued an outright refusal to support any "preventative ban" on the issue, and the United States is developing its own autonomous weapons programs. Without the support of these major military powers it is hard to see any future United Nation regulation being anything but symbolic.