Top AI engineers at defence technology companies defended the need for autonomous weapons on Thursday, amid a push for a ban on so-called "killer robots". More than 115 countries and 250 non-governmental organisations are calling for an international treaty to ban weapons that use artificial intelligence to identify and engage human targets, technology which United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called "morally repugnant."
Antoine Bordes, head of artificial intelligence at European defence start-up Helsing, told a conference at Sciences Po university in Paris: "The battlefield is flooded with data … whoever can harness this data, understand it, make sense of it faster is going to have a tactical edge."
