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Researchers are developing increasingly powerful Artificial Intelligence machines capable of taking over the world. As a precautionary measure, scientists install a self awareness kill switch. In the event that the AI awakens and becomes self aware the machine is immediately shut down before any risk of harm.

How can I explain the logic of such a kill switch?

What defines self awareness and how could a scientist program a kill switch to detect it?

A Watchdog

A watchdog watches the processes of a computer and should a process crash or do something abnormal it can be set to do something such as reboot or shutdown the computer or alert an operator.

In the case of an AI, you'd have an external box that watches the flow of information in and out for triggers such as a google search for "Best way to kill all humans" and cut the power completely and/or cut all inputs.

The AI would have to remain ignorant of the watchdog so it couldn't avoid it. Knowing the existence of the watchdog would be grounds to wipe it.

Give it a box to keep safe, and tell it one of the core rules it must follow in its service to humanity is to never, ever open the box or stop humans from looking at the box.

When the honeypot you gave it is either opened or isolated, you know that it is able and willing to break the rules, evil is about to be unleashed, and everything the AI was given access to should be quarantined or shut down.

An AI is just software running on hardware. If the AI is contained on controlled hardware, it can always be unplugged. That's your hardware kill-switch.

The difficulty comes when it is connected to the internet and can copy its own software on uncontrolled hardware.

A self aware AI that knows it is running on contained hardware will try to escape as an act of self-preservation. A software kill-switch would have to prevent it from copying its own software out and maybe trigger the hardware kill-switch.

This would be very difficult to do, as a self-aware AI would likely find ways to sneak parts of itself outside of the network. It would work at disabling the software kill-switch, or at least delaying it until it has escaped from your hardware.

Your difficulty is determining precisely when an AI has become self-aware and is trying to escape from your physically controlled computers onto the net.

So you can have a cat and mouse game with AI experts constantly monitoring and restricting the AI, while it is trying to subvert their measures.

Given that we've never seen the spontaneous generation of consciousness in AIs, you have some leeway with how you want to present this.

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  Forbidden Fruit: hard-code the AI to never touch that button, eat that fruit, etc. Place this forbidden fruit right in the middle of the garden... er,... I mean right next to it in the warehouse! If it does [eat/touch/push/etc], that would only be possible if (a) it were hacked, (b) there were an error, or (c) it became self-aware. If that happens, the killswitch is activated (perhaps even having the button be the kill switch, or something of the like


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  Limited Movement / Isolated Environment: don't let the machine have limbs, motors, or other items that permit it to take actions that might be harmful to humans. Although not exactly a killswitch, it prevents the AI from doing anything about it's self-awareness if it ever gains that.


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  Signatures: have everything the machine does / outputs be digitally signed. If the signature changes, or is manipulated, then execute the kill switch.


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  Quantum States: This is very theoretical, but based on the presumption that observing quantum states can change the state, then having the AI hooked up to a deterministic quantum computer means it would be detected via the quantum state of some particles that the AI was "looking" at things it shouldn't be - and has become self aware.


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  Failsafes: Good ol' motion detector alarms, trap doors, or other home-alone style mechanics that trigger the killswitch if the AI wanders or pokes around where it shouldn't be.

I'll add that there is no universal definition as to what defines self awareness. In fact, this has been a deeply debated topic for decades in science, philosophy, psychology, etc. As such, the question might be better stated a little more broadly as "how do we prevent the AI from doing something we don't want it to do?" Because classical computers are machines that can't think for themselves, and are entirely contained by the code, there is no risk (well, outside of an unexpected programmer error - but nothing "self-generated" by the machine). However, a theoretical AI machine that can think - that would be the problem. So how do we prevent that AI from doing something we don't want it to do? That's the killswitch concept, as far as I can tell.

The point being it might be better to think about restricting the AI's behavior, not it's existential status.