“Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways,” the letter read.

The invention the group of experts referred to is a hypothetical weapons system which, once activated, can kill and injure human targets without a human selecting the targets or pulling a trigger.