Aaron Bernstein/Reuters
Tesla boss Elon Musk, and more than 100 other leading artificial intelligence experts internationally, are calling for the United Nations to ban autonomous weapons. “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” the group wrote in an open letter released Monday. “Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.” The United States, Israel, China, South Korea, Britain, and Russia are just a few of the more than a dozen countries currently developing autonomous weapons systems. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways,” reads the letter.