Some of the biggest pioneers of tech, artificial intelligence, and robotics are calling on the United Nations to ban the development of autonomous weapons, which many are labeling "killer robots".

Bender

Tesla's Elon Musk and Alphabet's Mustafa Suleyman are part of a group of 116 business people and academics who have sent a letter to the UN, which has recently decided to begin discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks, and automated machine guns.  They announced this push at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Melbourne in hopes of avoiding a global arms race in the "third revolution in warfare", following gunpowder and nuclear arms.

"Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.  These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways," they wrote in a letter to the UN.  "We do not have long to act.  Once this Pandora's box is opened, it will be hard to close."

Terminator

The founders believe that "killer robots" ought to be added to the 1983 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which includes chemical weapons and lasers designed to intentionally blind enemy soldiers.