Elon Musk along with some 100+ assistants – such as Lisa Randall, Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Noam Chomsky, Steve Wozniak – have sent an open letter to the United Nations
AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS: AN OPEN LETTER FROM AI & ROBOTICS RESEARCHERSdemanding a ban on the killer robots, machines that are controlled by autonomous programs capable of killing the people. This technology is bound to start an arms race – like the two previous revolutions, gunpowder and nuclear bombs – and that's bad for everyone.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170822123745im_/https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cfurXA2Ui0Y/VdMLLvC_ieI/AAAAAAAAA2o/stODsHVbP74/s1600/robot%2B7.jpeg)
Except that it's not bad.
Civilized countries deal with lots of trivial armed enemies such as Daesh which could be easily defeated but no one really wants to do that. Some of the people who could fight Daesh are actually its allies. But even among those who aren't the allies of Daesh, no one really wants to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers in order to kill some pretty much irrelevant savages and bigots. The value of a Western soldier is several million dollars while the Daesh warrior is cheaper by many orders of magnitude. You surely don't want to sacrifice your boys on the man-against-man basis.