This is what the researchers casually refer to as 'pressing the big red button.' But like a child, sometimes it won't understand that a course of action could be harmful, either to itself, other people or the environment, and a human supervisor may need to step in and lead it back onto a safer path. The AI discussed work with a process called reinforcement learning, where its behavior is shaped by rewarding its successes, so the AI reads its environment and gradually learns which actions are most likely to lead to further rewards.

It relies on the concept of 'safe interruptibility,' which basically means letting a human safely intercede to stop an AI in its tracks. The kill switch intended for an AI that starts 'misbehaving' is proposed in a paper written by Laurent Orseau at Google DeepMind and Stuart Armstrong at the Future of Humanity Institute. With this in mind, researchers at Google DeepMind have devised a 'big red button' that would interrupt an AI that looks to be heading down a worrying path, while preventing it from learning to resist such an interruption. Artificially intelligent machines rising up to usurp their creators has long been a staple of science fiction, but rapid developments in AI have seen the potential for humans to be relegated to the evolutionary scrapheap become an immediate non-fiction fear for many.

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