Canada joined a growing international call to put the brakes on developing so-called killer robots.<\/p>\n
The country’s leaders in artificial intelligence have urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to be vocal about banning lethal uses of AI at the upcoming UN meetings on conventional weapons.<\/p>\n
Five Canadian experts in AI delivered an open letter to Trudeau last week with more than 200 signatures from researchers and scientists in the burgeoning field.<\/p>\n
\u201cLethal autonomous weapons systems that remove meaningful human control from determining the legitimacy of targets and deploying lethal force sit on the wrong side of a clear moral line,\u201d the letter reads.<\/p>\n
Ian Kerr, professor of ethics, law and technology at the University of Ottawa, led the call to action, along with Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer who leads both Google Brain and the Vector Institute in Toronto, Yoshua Bengio, co-founder of Element AI and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, as well as renowned researchers Rich Sutton and Doina Precup.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not often that captains of industry, scientists and technologists call for prohibitions on innovation of any sort \u2014 let alone an outright ban,\u201d said Kerr in a statement. \u201cThe Canadian AI research community is clear: we must not permit AI to target or kill without meaningful human control.\u201d<\/p>\n
The letter compared Trudeau’s\u00a0endorsement of a global\u00a0ban on the weaponization of AI to\u00a0Canada’s firm stance against\u00a0landmines in 1996, stating Canada can \u201creclaim its position of moral leadership on the world stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kerr explained delegating life-or-death decisions to machines crosses a fundamental moral line, referring to the deadly consequences of \u201cplaying Russian roulette with the lives of others.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not only a fundamental issue of human rights. The decision whether to ban or engage autonomous weapons goes to the core of our humanity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Trudeau government has backed a $125 million investment in AI research and innovation, showing an interest in the rapidly growing field as Canada cements itself as a global AI leader.<\/p>\n
\u201cArtificial Intelligence can improve people\u2019s lives in so many ways, but researchers need to push for positive applications of technology by supporting a ban on autonomous weapons systems,\u201d said Hinton.<\/p>\n