FLI July, 2018 Newsletter | AI

After years of voicing concerns, AI leaders have, for the first time, taken concrete action against lethal autonomous weapons, signing a pledge to “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.“

The pledge has been signed to date by over 220 AI-related companies and organizations from 36 countries, and 2,800 individuals from 90 countries. Signatories of the pledge include Google DeepMind, University College London, the XPRIZE Foundation, ClearPath Robotics/OTTO Motors, the European Association for AI (EurAI), the Swedish AI Society (SAIS), Demis Hassabis, British MP Alex Sobel, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio, Anca Dragan, and Toby Walsh.

FLI president Max Tegmark announced the pledge in a talk at the annual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) this month. The pledge has been covered by CNN, The Guardian, NPR, Forbes, The Washington Post, and Newsweek.

If you work with artificial intelligence in any way, and if you believe that the final decision to take a life should remain a human responsibility rather than falling to a machine, then please consider signing this pledge, either as an individual or on behalf of your organization.