Google Is Developing A 'Big Red Button' For Its AI Technology

Skynet was the name given to the fictional superintillgent system that nearly wiped out humanity in the popular "Terminator" franchise.

Skynet was originally a military system designed to remove human decision and error from all military applications. However, the system began to learn at a geometric rate and gained artificial consciousness. Military leaders tried to deactivate the system but failed to do so in time - perhaps because there was no "big red button."

Perhaps taking a cure from the '"Terminator", Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s Google has developed its own "big red button" for use in its next-generation technology, according to a report from Business Insider. The purpose of the button is to be able to immediately "pull the plug" on self-learning machines if the need ever arises to do so.

Stuart Armstrong, a philosopher at the University of Oxford co-authored a research report titled "Safely Interruptible Agents." The paper was co-authored by Laurent Orseau, a research scientist at DeepMind, a company that was acquired by Google in 2014.

The research report acknowledged that artificial technology is "unlikely to behave optimally all the time" and "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.

"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 report added.