Google has developed a 'big red button' that can be used to interrupt artificial intelligence and stop it from causing harm

Stuart Armstrong is a philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors. 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. The paper - titled "Safely Interruptible Agents [PDF]" and 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.