A dud unitary rocket or bomb is large and sticks out, allowing civilians to avoid it until experts can remove the danger. The problem was that the dud rate for M77 grenades was approximately 4 percent, meaning that every rocket launched might leave up to 26 unexploded grenades on the ground.ĭuds have always been an aspect of explosive weapons. A rocket fired from a M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System-the larger, heavier, older version of the HIMARS rocket system-was packed with 644 M77 grenades, or cluster bomblets. In the 1990s, attention was first drawn to the high dud rate of cluster bomblets. This results in many smaller explosions over a wider area.Īn empty Russian cluster munition rocket casing, like a Uragan rocket. As the munition sails through the air toward its target, small explosive charges break it open, ejecting the bomblets in all directions. These weapons are now known as unitary weapons to distinguish them from cluster munitions.Ĭluster munitions are bombs or shells that are filled with smaller, often baseball-sized, bomblets. When it explodes, the casing turns into deadly shrapnel, hurtling it in all directions, but the danger is focused on a single location and dissipates the farther away the enemy is. A typical bomb or artillery shell is a single munition with a metal (typically steel) casing and an explosive filler. Getty ImagesĬluster munitions were developed toward the end of World War II, and became popular during the Cold War. forces do not currently deploy Rockeye cluster bombs. Add your signature Loading.A Mk-20 Rockeye cluster bomb waits to be loaded aboard a Marine Harrier aboard the USS Kearsarge in the Adriatic Sea, off the Albanian coast. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control. In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons. 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 - and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. 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 perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. 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. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is - practically if not legally - feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Hosting, signature verification and list management are supported by FLI for administrative questions about this letter, please contact Max Tegmark.Ĭlick here to see this page in other languages: German Japanese RussianĪutonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. Journalists who wish to see the press release may contact Toby Walsh. This open letter was announced July 28 at the opening of the IJCAI 2015 conference on July 28.
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