Comment by Evan Ackerman

The problem with this argument is that no letter, UN declaration, or even a formal ban ratified by multiple nations is going to prevent people from being able to build autonomous, weaponized robots. The barriers keeping people from developing this kind of system are just too low. Consider the “armed quadcopters.” Today you can buy a smartphone-controlled quadrotor for US $300 at Toys R Us. Just imagine what you’ll be able to buy tomorrow. This technology exists. It’s improving all the time. There’s simply too much commercial value in creating quadcopters (and other robots) that have longer endurance, more autonomy, bigger payloads, and everything else that you’d also want in a military system. [...] Generally speaking, technology itself is not inherently good or bad: it’s what we choose to do with it that’s good or bad, and you can’t just cover your eyes and start screaming “STOP!!!” if you see something sinister on the horizon when there’s so much simultaneous potential for positive progress. What we really need, then, is a way of making autonomous armed robots ethical, because we’re not going to be able to prevent them from existing. [...] I’m not in favor of robots killing people. If this letter was about that, I’d totally sign it. But that’s not what it’s about; it’s about the potential value of armed autonomous robots, and I believe that this is something that we need to have a reasoned discussion about rather than banning.