Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14am, Eastern Time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
So were the words spoken by the Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, when referring at how mankind became the instrument of its own undoing by creating Skynet, a fully autonomous strategic defence system that goes rogue and decides that humans are a threat to its own existence. It launches an all-out nuclear attack on the Eastern bloc, knowing that they will retaliate with equal force, thus triggering Armageddon. The rest, as they say, is history.
While this may be a piece of classic sci-fi, a similar scenario could actually become a reality sooner than we expect.
A great deal of people from the science and technology fields, including Professor Stephen Hawking and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have released an open letter arguing that the development of autonomous weapons (that is, weapons without human control) will lead to a global arms race, with potentially devastating consequences.
The deployment of autonomous weapon systems will be feasible within a mere few years, rather than decades.
The letter concluded “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.”