After matching with someone on Tinder, there's no knowing what their opening message will be, or how you should reply. But help is at hand for when you just can't put your reply into words, in the form of Tinder Reactions – a new feature, similar to Facebook Reactions. The feature allows users to reply with full-screen flirty animations, including hearts, laughing faces or a big red cross, should you not like their message. After matching with someone on Tinder, there's no knowing what their opening message will be, and often how you should reply. But help is at hand for when you just can't put your reply into words, in the form of Tinder Reactions The feature gives users a selection of responses that can be used at any stage of conversation.

The first paper raising the concern over AI safety came out in 1994. Only in the last couple of years have we seen a concerted interest in making sure that AI and robots cannot intentionally or unintentionally harm individuals or themselves. This is due to a number of public statements of concern from Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom. But it is a sentiment expressed by many people who are seeing some amazing advances play out in the public press, such as AI systems driving cars, playing Atari at human-like skill levels, and publicly beating humans in the games of Jeopardy! Scientists have already started conducting research in "AI Safety".

That's just one of "five practical research problems" proposed by scientists at Google, OpenAI, Stanford and Berkeley in a paper called "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" (pdf). Others included "safe exploration" issues, or how to stop a curious cleaning robot from sticking a wet mop in an electrical socket, and "avoiding negative side effects" such as a robot breaking granny's vase when cleaning in a rush. The problems may seem a bit silly, when compared to an AI-induced doomsday, but Google researcher Chris Olah wrote, "These are all forward thinking, long-term research questions – minor issues today, but important to address for future systems." A particularly interesting portion of the paper was devoted to avoiding reward hacking, or how to stop AI from gaming its reward function. "Imagine that an agent discovers a buffer overflow in its reward function: it may then use this to get extremely high reward in an unintended way."

With so many people taking their cues from the movies on what a future with artificial intelligence will look like, some who fear one day having robotic overlords will be heartened by research that Google is doing. Google DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company that Google acquired in 2014, is working on what will be a kill switch for robots and other A.I. systems. The idea is that one day a smart machine might be able to override its own off button. If that's the case, then humans would need another way to gain the upper hand. "If an agent 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 agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions -- harmful either for the agent or for the environment," researchers wrote in a paper posted on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute website.

TechRadar and other tech sites are reporting that Google is thinking up a kill switch for dangerous AI. As TechRadar put it, humans can keep the upper hand, for now. David Nield reported: "Google is working on an AI'kill switch' that allows human operators to turn off super intelligent systems no matter how big their egos get. It's called "safe interruptibility" and it's being developed as part of the DeepMind system." An open letter went out last year that caused as much of a stir as the worrisome statements preceding it over building superintelligent machines.

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.

With artificial intelligence crossing milestones in its capability to learn rapidly from its environment and beat humans at tasks and games from Jeopardy to the ancient Chinese game Go, Alphabet's Google is taking proactive steps to ensure that the technology it is creating does not one day turn against humans. Google's AI research lab in London, DeepMind, teamed up with Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute to explore ways to prevent an AI agent from going rogue. In their joint-study, "Safely Interruptible Agents," the DeepMind-Future of Humanity team proposed a framework to allow humans to repeatedly and safely interrupt an AI agent's reinforcement learning. But, more importantly, this can be done while simultaneously blocking an AI agent's ability to learn how to prevent a human operator from turning off its machine-learning capabilities or reinforcement learning. It's not a stretch to think AI agents can learn how to outthink humans. Earlier this year, Google's AI agent AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol in Go, the ancient Chinese game of strategy.

Because Google wants to give humankind a fighting chance incase it accidentally makes Skynet. Google is trying to come out ahead of the imminent robot apocalypse by giving us humans a last hope in stopping the machines from taking over. The developers at Google-owned DeepMind technologies, which specializes in artificial intelligence, have proposed a "big red button" that could shut off the A.I. if anything goes wrong and wouldn't be susceptible to being disabled by the machine itself. If any company is going to build Skynet -- the fictional eye in the sky that leads to the near elimination of humankind in the Terminator movies -- it's Google. The parallels are just too easy to make. But you know, Skynet didn't start out evil.