Tech

Google ponders ‘big red button’ to stop dangerous A.I

Published

8 years ago

June 4, 2016

Tech giant, Google is considering employing the services of its big red button in a bid to stop a dangerous artificial intelligence.

As far as we know, artificial intelligence is the best way to automate vast complex tasks, like tagging millions of unique photos on Facebook or robots that learn how to walk. At a breakneck pace, computer scientists and roboticists are getting better at crafting these algorithms, which means that now is the time to think about stopping A.I.’s capacity to do wrong.

Google Deepmind, in conjunction with The Future of Humanity Institute, has released a study that determines how we would stop an artificially intelligent algorithm or robot if it were to go rogue. Their conclusion? A big red button.

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The study points to earlier research conducted in 2013 where a game-playing algorithm realized that if it just paused Tetris, it would never lose. These kinds of tricky, unintended exploits by machines are exactly what The Future of Humanity Institute preaches will happen.

Their founder, Nick Bostrom, wrote the book Superintelligence, which warns that when artificial intelligence teaches itself how to learn untethered, it will be able to learn so fast that humanity would be hopelessly outclassed. This kind of event has been referred to as the Singularity, a term first used in 1958 by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.

Safely interrupting a machine wouldn’t necessarily mean just pulling an electrical plug—in any foreseeable scenario where the A.I. is dangerous enough to do damage it would be autonomous or hosted on a server rack. Instead, the DeepMind and FoH study concludes that the machine would need to be tricked.

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