A global arms race is inevitable if any major military resorts to mass production of autonomous weapons, a group of over 1,000 scientistswarnedTuesday. Their rationale was that these arms will end up in the black market and in the hands of terrorists, warlords, and governments attempting to destabilize other governments.

The group of robotic experts from around the world, including Nobel Prize recipient Stephen Hawking, released a letter condemning any attempt by any government to produce autonomous weapons.

“Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” the letter states, suggesting that anybody will be able to own one.

The experts explained, “Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria.”

They said that artificial intelligence technology has reached the point where the deployment of such weapon systems is feasible within years

“Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce,” the letter states. “It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to carry out ethnic cleansing, etc.”

The robotic and artificial intelligence experts explained that this new technology could carry enormous benefits to society, but they warned that if they are used for war, people will lose credibility and reject it.

“Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons,” they assured.

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Hagel (L) looks at a tlas robot prototype developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon in 2014. | Photo: Reuters

In April, the U.K. expressed its opposition to an international ban on so-called “killer robots.”

The British government feels that one day autonomous weapons could reduce the killing of civilians, as autonomous weapons are expected to differentiate armed people from non-combatants.

In February 2013, Dr Noel Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert and professor at Sheffield University, said he believed that development of the weapons was already taking place in an effectively unregulated environment, with little attention being paid to moral implications and international law.

But in November 2014, the United Nations rather than oppose autonomous weapons, called for a strict supervision of their production and development.

According British newspaper The Guardian, the European Union, France, Spain, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Croatia, Mexico and Sierra Leone, among other states, agreed on warning of the potential dangers of these weapons, but instead of calling on a ban, they pushed for ongoing scrutiny to ensure that the weapons conformed to the Geneva conventions’ rules on proportionality in war.