EU to debate robot legal rights, mandatory "kill switches"

The idea of mandating manufacturers implement a form of "kill switch" into their designs is not new. In 2016 researchers at Google DeepMind proposed what they called a "big red button" that would prevent an AI from embarking on, or continuing, a harmful sequence of actions. The paper Google released discussed the problems with implementing such a form of kill switch into a machine with self-learning capabilities. After all, the AI may learn to recognize the actions that its human controller is trying to subvert and either avoid undertaking similar tasks causing it to become dysfunctional or, in a worst-case scenario, learn to disable its own "big red button."