Google DeepMind has developed a 'big red button' to stop AIs from causing harm

In the past year alone, Google-owned Deep Mind has made great strides in artificial intelligence. The company has long kept an eye towards safety with the establishment of an ethics board as part of the 2014 acquisition, and now a new paper (via BI) from DeepMind and the University of Oxford describes the creation of a "big red button" method that can be used to stop AI from causing harm… In the paper, DeepMind assumes that AI agents are "unlikely to behave optimally all the time" when interacting with the real world. As such, it's important that human operators are able to halt the AI from continuing "a harmful sequence of actions" and lead it to a safer situation. The paper defines harm as either to the surrounding environment or the agent itself. The method created by the researches goes a step further by making sure the AI does not prevent itself from being interrupted by humans.