Google Seeks Kill Switch for Rogue Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous machines sometimes "find unpredictable and undesirable shortcuts" to achieve their goals, the researchers explain. A self-driving car that learns to break traffic laws in order to avoid a crash may then break laws in other, in appropriate situations; a program taught to play a video game could learn to pause the game indefinitely in order to avoid losing. Building the countermeasure into the systems would "avoid the agent viewing the interruptions as being part of the environment, and thus part of the task."