Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking Warn Killer Robots Could Doom Humanity - A global robotic arms race is "virtually inevitable" unless a ban is enforced on artificial intelligence (AI) weapons, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, researchers and academicians have warned.

In an open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aries, the signatories caution that beginning a military AI arms race is a bad idea and it should be averted by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.

The letter notes that offensive autonomous weapons need no hard-to-obtain or expensive raw materials, so they will become cheap and ubiquitous for all significant military powers to mass-produce, which would not be beneficial for humanity.

Current high-tech warfare is largely waged through remote control machines. At present, the U.S. military has the PROTECTOR, a 1,000-pound rover that scans for bombs and fires a bazooka, and MADSS, a 1,400-pound rover that carries gear and shoots a machine gun.

The Israeli "Iron Dome" system detects and shoots down incoming rockets, while the U.S. naval combat ships have "Phalanx CIWS" system, which has a swiveling Gattling gun, to detect and shoot incoming rockets.