Honestly, computers kill every day. They kind of have to, right? They run so many aspects of our lives, computer glitches happen, machines malfunction, people get hurt or die. We can call those accidental deaths. We (for some reason) operate under the assumption that computers will make mistakes and malfunction, and say that that is okay, it's all part of the Grand Calculus. I say "for some reason" because humans have weirdly lax standards when it comes to general computing reliability, but at least we treat most of these systems as safety-critical systems, which do have higher standards. If you go up the stack a bit, you can find lots of places where computers contribute to people's deaths --- but it's hard to say it directly causes them. Algorithmic credit systems with embedded biases and hospital analytics, for example, make decisions that vastly impact a person's well-being. It's really hard to quantify what the impact of these systems are, but still, it's probably under studied. The cynic in me says that maybe this type of research is strategically underfunded, though it's also possible that a mixture of difficulty and the quandary of choice of where to focus one's efforts has led to us getting poor overall estimates. But I almost feel it should be possible to have a running scoreboard. Going further up the stack, we start getting into the land of autonomous, AI-powered cyberphysical systems. The thing is, there probably are far fewer deaths to speak of here! For example, a Tesla car on autopilot accidentally strikes someone darting through the street at night. Even the larger numbers reported are likely a safer rate than human driving. These are accidental deaths. But the weird thing is, people tend to dissociate this from "robots" or "AI" killing, even though is exactly what happened --- a robot car killed a person. It wasn't a murder, and that's a key difference. It wasn't supposed to do that. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a bad outcome, and probably it is the most common, baddest outcome we've seen so far.
Going further up the stack still, we get to the land of military AI weaponry. People tend to get extremely cagey here, and scared. It's easy to imagine a scenario where weaponry becomes more and more autonomous and more and more decisions are taken out of humans' hands. The biggest issue is not machines overthrowing their human owners, but rather, machines making decisions so quickly that humans don't have a chance to stop them --- even if they're effectively doing the thing that humans asked them to. This could be both accidental killing and purposeful killing. Famously in the 1980s, the U.S. and Russia almost went to nuclear war --- not because either side was actually threatening a strike, but because of a computer glitch. Sun glares led to U.S. computer systems confusing solar radiation with Soviet missiles. A human operator had to make a judgment call, and ultimately decided, no, it doesn't make sense that the Soviets would launch such a strike on America, not at this time, not in this way. It certainly helped that there was always a landline of communication between the two superpowers at the time, in part to make sure that situations like this did not happen. But what happens when this is not the decision of a human, but of a computer, and that system makes a mistake? This can also happen in war, in real-time; a machine with a gun has to decide whether or not to shoot a target. Is it a threat, or a civilian? What happens when it's a rebel, who could be both? There are serious ethical quandaries here. We can make them into AI systems, and if we are really going down this path, we must. At the least, I personally don't think there is anything inherently unethical about AI weapons in war. I'd rather have the machines largely kill each other than to kill human soldiers. And it's even possible, that like with automobiles, they do outperform humans. People don't like the apparent stochasticity that comes with this, and I get that. But I see nothing signaling that this is inherently worse than war as usual, although I do wonder what a cyber attack would mean in a case like this.
People are uncomfortable when you can say that robots can murder people. It was the source of much hullabaloo and debate in San Francisco, recently. There was a report of a drone killing an operator in simulation (simulation!!), and people became concerned. These stoke visions of, well, the terminator. And it worries me that technology creeps into people's lives, sometimes takes those lives away, and if it happens slowly enough, people lose the ability to care. There's already enough run by algorithms in our lives that people do not bat an eye to. It feels like the old adage about the robotic frog in the slowly heated oil bath (or I think that was the gist, anyway). Some people will go all the way up the stack, and worry about "existential risk," real-world analogues of Skynet enslaving or exterminating the globe. But I'll argue, before worrying about that, worry about all these other layers that are already getting people killed first.
People who should know better have a history of worrying about the future. What happens when AI eventually kills someone, they ask, when it's clearly already happened? Drones have clearly already done this. I'd love to see their surprised Pikachu reactions to that detail. I'm not telling you to panic, but don't worry about the future --- worry about the present.