We welcome Sam Wallace’s contribution to the discussion on a proposed ban on offensive autonomous weapons. This is a complex issue and there are interesting arguments on both sides that need to be weighed up carefully.
His article, written as a response to an open letter signed by over 2500 AI and robotics researchers, begins with the claim that such a ban is as “unrealistic as the broad relinquishment of nuclear weapons would have been at the height of the cold war.”
This argument misses the mark. First, the letter proposes not unilateral relinquishment but an arms control treaty. Second, nuclear weapons were successfully curtailed by a series of arms-control treaties during the cold war, without which we might not have been here to have this conversation.
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