Last week, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun were named the winners of the 2018 Turing Award. The A.M. Turing Award, sometimes referred to as computing’s Nobel Prize, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing by the Association for Computing Machinery.

All three honourees are supporters of a ban on autonomous weapons, having signed public letters calling on states to take action. Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, who are both based in Canada, spoke with the Toronto Star regarding their concerns about autonomous weapons and the lack of progress on a ban.

While the award was being announced, states were meeting at the United Nations for the Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems. The meeting was marked by a minority of states delaying progress sought by the majority of states. States need to heed the concerns and warnings of experts like the 2018 Turing Award winners and the general public who do not want to see autonomous weapons developed.