Google's 'big red' killswitch could prevent an AI uprising

Google has suggested a "big red button" could be used to prevent artificial intelligence from a "harmful sequence of actions". A research paper from DeepMind and the University of Oxford says there should be a way to "repeatedly safely interrupt" an algorithm. "Safe interruptibility can be useful to take control of a robot that is misbehaving and may lead to irreversible consequences, or to take it out of a delicate situation, or even to temporarily use it to achieve a task it did not learn to perform or would not normally receive rewards for this," the paper, which proposes a framework to let humans stop an algorithms from continuing on a dangerous path, says. The paper's authors – Laurent Orseau, from DeepMind, and Stuart Armstrong from the The Future of Humanity Institute – explain that an "interruption policy" could be built into algorithms to safely stop a machine. Reinforcement learning algorithms, the paper continues, often work in complex environments, such as "the real world", and are unlikely to act as they are intended on every occasion.