Google turns to University of Oxford to create DeepMind 'Off' switch

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.