Does Musk and friends know something we don't know? The appeal to ban killer robots implies that they are already being built. Technocrats build because they can, not because they ever asked why they should build something.
Regardless of benevolent-sounding platitudes about helping medical patients, DARPA's singular military mission is to create technology-enhanced super-soldiers.
Hat tip to Gen. Paul Selva for bringing ethics into the argument to not give the military autonomous killing robots. However, he acknowledges the infighting within the military over the issue and describes it as 'raucous'. This is a battle between Technocrats and non-Technocrats.
Ma runs Alibaba, China's equivalent of Amazon, and is one of the richest men in the world. He concludes that if nothing is done to prevent it, we are headed to WWIII. Ma does not regret being part of the Technocracy that brought us to this point, but apparently he is scaring himself along with everyone else.
Lasers are abounding in military applications, and have been mounted on trucks, ships, airplanes, and now helicopters. This is Technocrats run amok as they invent and create because they can.
The NSA discovered how to secretly hack Windows, but didn't tell anyone. When the hack was leaked, real hackers jumped on it and turned the world upside-down. This means the the NSA is a 'Black-Hat" hacker. White-Hat hackers have a moral code of ethics to always disclose a known vulnerability as soon as it is discovered. Technocrats at the NSA see no need for disclosure of any kind, and will likely never be held accountable for the billions in damages caused by the Wannacry ransomeware virus.
Three years ago, the military told us that robots will not be used to kill people: so, why are they teaching them to shoot? Lesson: Technocrats lie to perpetuate their inventions.
DARPA is a Technocrat-run agency of the Department of Defense and is wholly-dedicated to the Transhuman idea of improving man through technology. This is dangerous on a number of levels, including the fact that resulting technology will be in the hands of the government and not its citizens.
The robot warfare arms race is red hot, with larger and more destructive killing machines under development. As AI meets armed robots, terminator scenarios won't seem to distant.
When humans can be autonomously killed by machines, humanity is in grave danger. The U.S. Air Force has just crossed the ethical boundary, leaving the path wide-open for anybody with killing authority to jump on the bandwagon.