Comment by Gill Pratt

I believe that now is the wrong time to be making decisions like this. Having the discussion is fine. But saying, “No, we’re not going to work on this” is wrong. First, we need to understand what’s possible. We can make a choice not to use what we develop - we have made choices like that with bio-weapons, for example. We made a choice to ban them. In the case of lethal autonomy, we need to learn a whole lot more and there’s a whole of good that they can do, too, in stopping lethal errors from happening. I would like to see where we can get to with that. There are also whole lot of reasons why a ban is impractical right now. To call for one now based on an emotional fear of a far future thing, this is the wrong time to do that.