Killer robots may be a common theme in science fiction, but in his latest flight of fancy, Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has added killer robots to the list of things he doesn’t like alongside artificial intelligence.

In a letter released Monday, supported by more than 100 robotics and artificial intelligence experts, Musk called upon the United Nations to ban “autonomous weapons,” which is a polite way of saying killer robots. Musk and friends argue that “lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare” that “will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend.”

The letter to the UN goes on, “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.”

Although it’s easy to dismiss the concerns as Musk’s latest scaremongering, killer robots of a sort already exist. South Korea has deployed an autonomous weapons platform along its border with North Korea. Developed by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and called the SGR-AI, the fully autonomous “surveillance tool” is able to detect, track and fire upon intruders – basically a killer robot but not as sexy as in the movies. However, as The Washington Post notes, the platform is not currently being operated in an autonomous mode but it capable of doing so.

The new call for a ban of killer robots follows on from a similar call made to the UN in 2015 that was supported by Musk and others, notably Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak and physicist Stephen Hawking, that warned about of the dangers of artificial intelligence in weapons, which could be used in “assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.”

Photo: stephen bowler/Wikimedia Commons