By Desiree Salas (media@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Jul 29, 2015 06:00 AM EDT

Some of the world's top authorities and figures in the fields of science and technology have recently issued a collective warning about the use of autonomous weapons in the arms race through an open letter. The said appeal had been presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aries, Wired said.

"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," the letter stated.

The open letter represented the sentiments of physicist Stephen Hawking, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as well as 1,000 academics, researchers, and public figures.

The signatories, while affirming that AI "has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so," pointed out that using AI technology in developing weapons is not beneficial to humanity.

"The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting," Dawn quoted the article as saying. "If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable."

"The deployment of such systems is, practically if not legally, feasible within years, not decades," the letter added.

"[The weapons] require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce," the letter also said, according to CNN. "Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group."

The signatories also said that AI, however, can be used in many ways to "make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people."

According to The Independent, South Korea had revealed similar robotic weapons last year, such as "armed sentry robots, that are currently installed along the border with North Korea."

"Their cameras and heat sensors allow them to detect and track humans automatically, but the machines need a human operator to fire their weapons," the news source said.

CNN also mentioned an automated Israeli system called the "Iron Dome" that can spot and shoot down incoming targets.

While the automated arms race apparently has begun, anti-robotic weapons advocates have also begun their work in preventing the prevalent use of such a technology.

"The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a group formed in 2012 by a list of NGOs including Human Rights Watch, works to preemptively ban robotic weapons," The Independent detailed. "They are currently working to get the issue of robotic weapons on the table of the Convention of Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a UN-linked group that seeks to prohibit the use of certain conventional weapons such as landmines and laser weapons."

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