Machines could deliberately wipe out the human race or do so by

Google's secretive AI division is working on a 'big red button' that can halt its artificial intelligence software.

Researchers have previously warned that AI could threaten humanity, with doomsday scenarios of AIs taking over, with one expert involved in the new paper admitting Google's historic win over Go world champion proves AI can be 'unpredictable and immoral'.

Now the DeepMind team say they have the answer - an off switch.

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Google's DeepMind team say AI agents are 'unlikely to behave optimally all the time' and have called for 'safe interruptibility' to be built into systems.

GOOGLE SETS UP AI ETHICS BOARD TO CURB THE RISE OF THE ROBOTS Google has set up an ethics board to oversee its work in artificial intelligence. The search giant has recently bought several robotics companies, along with Deep Mind, a British firm creating software that tries to help computers think like humans. One of its founders warned artificial intelligence is 'number one risk for this century,' and believes it could play a part in human extinction. 'Eventually, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this,' DeepMind's Shane Legg said in a recent interview. Among all forms of technology that could wipe out the human species, he singled out artificial intelligence, or AI, as the 'number 1 risk for this century.' The ethics board, revealed by web site The Information, is to ensure the projects are not abused. Neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, 37, founded DeepMind two years ago with the aim of trying to help computers think like humans. Advertisement

The researchers, Laurent Orseau of Deep Mind and Dr Stuart Armstrong at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, explain in the paper that AI agents are 'unlikely to behave optimally all the time.'

'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 - and lead the agent into a safer situation.'

They say that 'safe interruptibility' is key.

'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.'

However, they admit that some systems could be unable to be halted.

'It is unclear if all algorithms can be easily made safely interruptible,' the authors admit.

Dr Armstrong has previously warned it's a race against time to develop safeguards around artificial intelligence research, before robots outwit us - or even accidentally cause our demise.

Speaking at a debate on artificial intelligence in London earlier this year, he warned that humans could be wiped out even if robots are instructed to protect people.

Dr Armstrong, based at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, predicted that robots will be increasingly integral to our everyday lives, doing menial tasks, but will eventually make humans redundant and take over,The Telegraph reported.

He believes machines will work at speeds inconceivable to the human brain and will skip communicating with humans to take control of the economy and financial markets, transport, healthcare and more.

The robots will have what's known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), enabling them to do much more than carry out specific and limited tasks.

Dr Stuart Armstrong believes it's a race against time to develop safeguards around artificial intelligence research, before robots outwit us (such as in the film Transcendence (screenshot pictured), or even accidently cause our demise

'Anything you can imagine the human race doing over the next 100 years there's the possibility AGI will do very, very fast,' he said.

Dr Armstrong is concerned that a simple instruction to an AGI to 'prevent human suffering' could be interpreted by a super computer as 'kill all humans' or that 'keep humans safe' could lead to machines locking people up.

'There is a risk of this kind of pernicious behaviour by an AI,' he said, adding that human language is subtle and can be easily misinterpreted.

'You can give AI controls, and it will be under the controls it was given. But these may not be the controls that were meant.'

He predicts that it will be difficult to tell whether a machine has deadly 'intentions' or not and could act as if it is a benefit to humanity right until the point it takes control of all functions.

Professor Stephen Hawking has previously told the BBC: 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.'

Dr Armstrong, of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, predicted that robots will be increasingly integral to our everyday lives (illustrated with a stock image), doing menial tasks, but will eventually make humans redundant and take over

This echoes claims he made earlier in the year when he said success in creating AI 'would be the biggest event in human history, [but] unfortunately, it might also be the last.'

In November, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Space-X and Tesla, warned that the risk of 'something seriously dangerous happening' as a result of machines with artificial intelligence, could be in as few as five years.

He has previously linked the development of autonomous, thinking machines, to 'summoning the demon'.

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October last year, Musk described artificial intelligence as our 'biggest existential threat'.

He said: 'I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.

'With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. You know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and … he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out.'

While Dr Armstrong acknowledges that super intelligent computers could find cures for cancer and other illnesses, for example, but said that mankind is now in a race to create safe artificially intelligent machines, before it's too late.

Professor Stephen Hawking (pictured) has previously told the BBC : 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race'

One suggestion is to teach robots a moral code, but Dr Armstrong is pessimistic this will work because humans find it hard to separate right and wrong and are often not good role models when it comes to exemplary behaviour.

A group of scientists and entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk and Professor Hawking signed an open letter in January promising to ensure AI research benefits humanity.

The letter warns that without safeguards on intelligent machines, mankind could be heading for a dark future.

The document, drafted by the Future of Life Institute, said scientists should seek to head off risks that could wipe out mankind.

Dr Armstrong is concerned that a simple instruction to an artificially intelligent machine to 'prevent human suffering' could be interpreted by a super computer as 'kill all humans'

The authors say there is a 'broad consensus' that AI research is making good progress and would have a growing impact on society.

It highlights speech recognition, image analysis, driverless cars, translation and robot motion as having benefited from the research.

'The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable,' the authors write.

HOW ALPHAGO WORKS: THE CHALLENGES OF BEATING A HUMAN Traditional AI methods, which construct a search tree over all possible positions, don't have a chance when it comes to winning at Go. So DeepMind took a different approach by building a system, AlphaGo, that combines an advanced tree search with deep neural networks. These neural networks take a description of the Go board as an input and process it through 12 different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections. One neural network called the 'policy network,' selects the next move to play, while the other neural network - the 'value network' - predicts the winner of the game. 'We trained the neural networks on 30 million moves from games played by human experts, until it could predict the human move 57 per cent of the time,' Google said. The previous record before AlphaGo was 44 per cent. However, Google DeepMind's goal is to beat the best human players, not just mimic them. The world's top Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match after the fourth match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in Seoul, South Korea. To do this, AlphaGo learned to discover new strategies for itself, by playing thousands of games between its neural networks and adjusting the connections using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning. Of course, all of this requires a huge amount of computing power and Google used its Cloud Platform. To put AlphaGo to the test, the firm held a tournament between AlphaGo and the strongest other Go programs, including Crazy Stone and Zen. AlphaGo won every game against these programs. The program then took on reigning three-time European Go champion Fan Hui at Google's London office. In a closed-doors match last October, AlphaGo won by five games to zero. It was the first time a computer program has ever beaten a professional Go player. Advertisement

But they issued a stark warning that research into the rewards of AI had to be matched with an equal effort to avoid the potential damage it could wreak.

For instance, in the short term, it claims AI may put millions of people out of work.

In the long term, it could have the potential to play out like a fictional dystopias in which intelligence greater than humans could begin acting against their programming.

'Our AI systems must do what we want them to do,' the letter says.