It’s the time of year when tens of thousands of people descend on Austin, Texas for the South by South West (SXSW) cultural festival. Protests and other attempts to grab attention for causes are not unusual, but this year brought something a little different.

A group, numbering a few dozen, marched through the streets to protest robots and artificial intelligence, chanting “I say robot, you say no-bot!” reports USA Today.

The group were not luddites but, primarily, engineering students from the University of Texas.

The group was not is not against either robots or artificial intelligence in principle. Specifically, they oppose an over reliance on the technologies.

“This is is about morality in computing. Planes can fly themselves, but the person who is ultimately responsible for landing a plane is a human,” protest organizer Adam Mason told Raw Story.

Although the concern may be new to many, there has been an ongoing discussion of the issues in the science and tech communities for some time. Physicist Stephen Hawking and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk are mmong those with concerns about the technology.

“The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history…Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks,” wrote Hawking in an open letter published in the Independent in 2014.

In January, Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to “support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity.”

“Building advanced AI is like launching a rocket. The first challenge is to maximize acceleration, but once it starts picking up speed, you also need to to focus on steering,” said Skype-founder Jaan Tallinn, one of FLI’s founders.

Others in the field believe that the students, along with Musk, Hawking and others are premature if not misguided.

“They see the big picture, but they don’t know where we are technologically. We could be a thousand years from what they are worrying about. There are so many things we don’t understand. I think slowing it down would be a disservice to humanity. I’m glad there are people who think that way. Let’s think about this scientifically, but let’s not stop research. I think if you were to ask Elon Musk if we should stifle progress, I don’t think he would want to do that,” Ramses Alcaide, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist and CEO of Neurable which is developing brain-computer interfaces for people with disabilities told Techcrunch.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin agreed. “People worry about robots taking over the world, but I assure you there are much more dangerous things (income inequality and global warming) in front of the line,” he said.

Concerns over AI and robots have probably been helped along by science fiction titles such as I, Robot and the Terminator franchise.

It is not immediately clear how any rules or ethics would be imposed on a technology that anyone, anywhere in the world with some basic tools and a power supply can work on and conceivably make advancements in.

It is also not clear how an international agreement could be reached given the international communities inability to reach consensus on issues like climate change and human rights.