Artificial intelligence experts, including Stephen Hawking, have signed the

Autonomous weapons – more bluntly referred to by some as killer robots – are capable of selecting and neutralising targets without any human oversight. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people. If a large military power began developing AI weapons – technology that is merely years away, the authors of letter claim – the consequences would be dire.

In it, the signatories lay out their concern that since “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high” and that their proliferation could lead to a “military artificial intelligence arms race”. However, the development of fully autonomous weapons that can fight and kill without human interference should be squeezed in the bud. The first letter talked about how the main goal of A.I. should be benefiting humanity while preventing the multiple technological apocalypse situations often portrayed in movies.

Now, the experts have called for a specific ban on the use of artificial intelligence to manage weapons that would be “beyond meaningful human control”.

The letter has been put together by the Future of Life Institute, a group that works to mitigate “existential risks facing humanity”, warns of the danger of starting a “military AI arms race”.

“If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable”, the letter continued. It isn’t entirely clear who the letter is addressed to, other than the academics and researchers who will be attending the conferences.

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have both previously warned of the dangers of advanced AI.

Hawking and Musk have already expressed heightened caution regarding AI technologies.

MIT professor Noam Chomsky, Google AI chief Demis Hassabis, and consciousness expert Daniel Dennett are among others to have endorsed the letter.

They are now working to get the issue of robotic weapons on the table of the Convention of Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a UN-linked group that seeks to prohibit the use of certain conventional weapons such as landmines and laser weapons, which, like the Campaign hopes autonomous weapons will be, were preemptively banned in 1995.