We find killer robots either menacing or cool in movies. One movie franchise that presents both is the Terminator and the story behind the movie might just come true, if the world’s leading scientists and robotic companies on artificial intelligence are to be believed.

Research on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can allow for autonomous and intelligent machines, is now moving at breathtaking pace. We are now seeing unmanned vehicles in military and civilian applications, and in the area of military applications, there are efforts to come up with autonomous unmanned vehicles that can do the mission on their own without needing any remote human pilot. One example is the British “Taranis” project which is an unmanned combat aerial vehicle that is intended to include “full autonomy.”

Will fully autonomous and intelligent robots pose a threat to society just like in the Terminator, or like The Matrix? In a letter signed  by 116 founders and leaders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies they are calling for a ban on killer robots at the start of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) as the United Nations (UN) voted to start discussions on such types of weapons systems as an arms race on autonomous and unmanned weapons systems is starting to heat up.

One of the signatories is Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Systems and perhaps the most interesting man in bleeding edge technologies with his ventures on electric vehicles with Tesla, OpenAI for Artificial Intelligence, space exploration with SpaceX, faster mass transportation with the Hyperloop, and more. Another is Mustafa Suleyman of Alphabet, the holding company of Google, and is the head of AI of Google DeepMind, the company he founded before Google bought it.

The signatories wrote (as reported by Business Insider Australia):

Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.

We therefore implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.

There are too many ifs and buts right now as well as variables in the creation of autonomous weapon systems, or to put in bluntly, killer robots. The letter shows the apprehension of the leading minds of robotics and AI, and it is so hard to question that as they know more about such than the ordinary person on the street. If you remember the news about Facebook shutting their AI experiment down when their AI robots began communicating in their own language, just imagine if robots began communicating to each other and decide to make their own destiny at the expense of humans? Or an experiment of an armed robot gone awry and hard to shut it down? Or a rogue nation or group of hackers controlling robots that can wreck destruction?

Others will point out to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” as a good starting point to help safeguard humans from robots:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

But then, any rogue country, company or organization may just want to have robots not following the laws whatever any convention governing the development of armed robots. With the breakneck speed of technology, we do see these killer robots appearing soon and they will be deadlier and smarter than the present day UAVs and drones.

So do you think a ban on killer robots be put immediately and devote research to robots that save lives rather than wage war?