Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Nobody's Ready for the Killer Robot

A Q&A with General Robert Latiff on the ethics of warfare in the autonomous future.

December 30, 2017 at 1:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

Is there a human in the loop?
Photographer: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

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It was another busy year for everybody's favorite automotive-industry disruptor, space-travel visionary and potential James Bond villain Elon Musk. Tesla surpassed Ford and General Motors in market capitalization; the Gigafactory began churning out lithium-ion batteries; his neighborhood roofing company began installing solar panels that aren't crimes against architecture; he's sending two rockets to Mars; he started digging a giant tunnel under Los Angeles; and he dissed President Donald Trump over the Paris Climate Accord. (OK, he had a few misses too; just ask anybody on the Model 3 waiting list.)

Given all this, you may have overlooked another of Musk's 2017 initiatives: saving humanity. Last summer, he and a bunch of other tech-industry A-listers -- including Google's artificial-intelligence guru Mustafa Suleyman -- wrote a letter to the United Nations urging a ban on killer robots. The future dystopia they anticipate would make you nostalgic for Skynet: