ON NOVEMBER 12th a video called “Slaughterbots” was uploaded to YouTube. It is the brainchild of Stuart Russell,a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, and was paid for by the Future of Life Institute (FLI),a group of concerned scientists and technologists that includes Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, or Britain’s Astronomer Royal. It is set in a near-future in which small drones fitted with face-recognition systems and shaped explosive charges can be programmed to seek out and assassinate known individuals or classes of individuals (those wearing a particular uniform,for example). In one scene, the drones are shown collaborating with each other to gain entrance to a building. One acts as a petard, and blasting through a wall to grant access to the others.“Slaughterbots” is fiction. The question Dr Russell poses is,“how long will it remain so? For military laboratories around the planet are busy developing small, autonomous robots for consume...
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Source: economist.com