It's an interesting turn of events, particularly after Ke once said he didn't want to play Google's Deepmind computer because it would learn his playing style. "I don't want to play against AlphaGo because I can tell from its performance that it is weaker than me," he told Chinese media. "I don't want it to copy my patterns and learn from me." Those emotions changed when 33-year-old 9th dan professional Lee Sedol was finally defeated by AlphaGo. The win is considered a huge milestone for artificial intelligence given the complexity of the Chinese board game.

Google has suggested a "big red button" could be used to prevent artificial intelligence from a "harmful sequence of actions". A research paper from DeepMind and the University of Oxford says there should be a way to "repeatedly safely interrupt" an algorithm. "Safe interruptibility can be useful to take control of a robot that is misbehaving and may lead to irreversible consequences, or to take it out of a delicate situation, or even to temporarily use it to achieve a task it did not learn to perform or would not normally receive rewards for this," the paper, which proposes a framework to let humans stop an algorithms from continuing on a dangerous path, says. The paper's authors – Laurent Orseau, from DeepMind, and Stuart Armstrong from the The Future of Humanity Institute – explain that an "interruption policy" could be built into algorithms to safely stop a machine. Reinforcement learning algorithms, the paper continues, often work in complex environments, such as "the real world", and are unlikely to act as they are intended on every occasion.

The Future of Humanity Institute, University of OxfordStuart Armstrong is a philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors. Machines are becoming more intelligent every year thanks to advances being made by companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. AI agents, as they're sometimes known, can already beat us at complex board games like Go and they're becoming more competent in a range of other areas. Now a London AI research lab owned by Google has carried out a study to make sure we can pull the plug on self-learning machines when we want to. DeepMind, acquired by Google for a reported 400 million in 2014, teamed up with scientists at the University of Oxford to find a way to make sure AI agents don't learn to prevent, or seek to prevent humans from taking control.

Ever since the creation of artificial intelligence, we've worried about what the consequences would be if AI suddenly decided it knew better than we did and started making decisions of its own. This hypothetical scenario hardly ever ends well. It's comforting, then, to know that Google is working on an AI'kill switch' that allows human operators to turn off super intelligent systems no matter how big their egos get. It's called "safe interruptibility" and it's being developed as part of the DeepMind system that recently proved its prowess at Go. The team working on DeepMind has published a paper on the topic and set out a basic framework for a kill switch (or "big red button") that will wind down whatever robot army is currently marching on the major capitals of the world.

With artificial intelligence crossing milestones in its capability to learn rapidly from its environment and beat humans at tasks and games from Jeopardy to the ancient Chinese game Go, Alphabet's Google is taking proactive steps to ensure that the technology it is creating does not one day turn against humans. Google's AI research lab in London, DeepMind, teamed up with Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute to explore ways to prevent an AI agent from going rogue. In their joint-study, "Safely Interruptible Agents," the DeepMind-Future of Humanity team proposed a framework to allow humans to repeatedly and safely interrupt an AI agent's reinforcement learning. But, more importantly, this can be done while simultaneously blocking an AI agent's ability to learn how to prevent a human operator from turning off its machine-learning capabilities or reinforcement learning. It's not a stretch to think AI agents can learn how to outthink humans. Earlier this year, Google's AI agent AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol in Go, the ancient Chinese game of strategy.

Some may think it's nothing to worry about, but it is true that a self-learning, intelligent machine will not be perfect. Even if they may not turn evil and want to take over the world, chances are there will be times when these AI agents make harmful decisions. This is why Google is creating a safe way to interrupt their actions. Google-owned company DeepMind specializes in AI research and is in charge of this study. Think of it as a kill switch of sorts.

Google has teamed up with scientists at the University of Oxford to ensure that its AI, DeepMind, won't be able to overpower human control by creating, what is essentially, an off switch. Revealed in a peer-reviewed paper titled'Safely Interruptible Agents', the framework allows a human operator to safely interrupt an AI without the AI learning how to prevent or induce interruptions. "If such an agent (AI) is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agony from continuing a harmful sequence of actions - harmful either for the agent or for the environment - and lead the agent to into a safer situation." Speaking to Business Insider, Google DeepMind scientist and one of the paper's writers, Laurent Orseau, explained: "If the agent expects a reward but can predict it's going to be shut down. It will try to resist so as to get its reward.

Machines are becoming more intelligent every year thanks to advances being made by companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. AI agents, as they're sometimes known, can already beat us at complex board games like Go, and they're becoming more competent in a range of other areas. Now a London artificial-intelligence research lab owned by Google has carried out a study to make sure that we can pull the plug on self-learning machines when we want to. DeepMind, bought by Google for a reported 400 million pounds -- about 580 million -- in 2014, teamed up with scientists at the University of Oxford to find a way to make sure that AI agents don't learn to prevent, or seek to prevent, humans from taking control. The paper -- "Safely Interruptible Agents PDF," published on the website of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) -- was written by Laurent Orseau, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, Stuart Armstrong at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, and several others.

DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence company, catapulted itself into fame when its AlphaGo AI beat the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol. However, DeepMind is working to do a lot more than beat humans at chess and Go and various other games. Indeed, its AI algorithms were developed for something far greater: To "solve intelligence" by creating general purpose AI that can be used for a host of applications and, in essence, learn on their own. This, of course, raises some concerns. Namely, what do we do if the AI breaks…if it gets a virus…if it goes rogue?

Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence has started working with the doctors and computers at London's Royal Free Hospital Trust; many of the first questions being asked concentrate on data security and patient confidentiality. About 1.6m patients a month are seen by the three hospitals that the Trust covers and, according to an agreement seen by the New Scientist magazine, the data includes patient information from the past five years. That data can't be used by Google in any other part of its business, it is stored by a third party and will have to be destroyed/given back when the agreement ends, according to the New Scientist. Google wants to apply machine learning to mine the data and help doctors by predicting care needs – both at the level of the individual patient and the wider community. If the pilot works then implications are huge: clever new algorithms will help make healthcare better and be more efficient at treatment. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) could predict the outbreak of infectious diseases from scattered hospital admissions data before a human expert has noticed.