Google DeepMind’s kill switch research may ease A.I. fears

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. “However, if the learning agent… learns in the long run to avoid such interruptions, for example by disabling the red button, it is an undesirable outcome.”

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