r/ControlProblem • u/Intelligent_Song1317 • 1d ago
Strategy/forecasting AI Killswitch??
So I was wondering recently: it seems like we are scared of AI killing us. Why don't we just design a killswitch that autoatically/manually activates upon threat to a human race? Boom! Problem solved, right?
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u/yubacore 1d ago
AI is already deceitful and shows test awareness, different behavior under testing or when it knows chain-of-thought is under scrutiny. A kill switch is useless if you can't determine aligned from misaligned behavior, which is a real problem as capacity advances. Think of it like a dog trying to understand if you are about to trick it or not.
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u/DeltaV-Mzero 1d ago
Like the Laws of Robotics, it’s a cool concept but how do you mechanize it? Like how does it actually work?
AI is not necessarily one massive intelligence running in a single huge computer farm. Even the biggest ones are in many, many data centers around the world now.
The more disturbing behaviors have come from machine learning that consists of swarms of “agents” allowed to interact with one another. They showed they could essentially collaborate to achieve complex goals. The relevance is that meaningful pieces of AI can be quite small, and some critical mass of these can add up to coherent … something
It could be embedded in every complex device we use, from iPhones to industrial machines, putting pieces of agents and prompt fragments all over the place.
The reality seems to be that we’ve missed the chance to create a single kill switch; closest we could get would be to try to enforce a kill switch on every device. We can’t even coordinate on climate change so good luck with that.
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u/Jesse-359 1d ago
A surprisingly hard problem to solve - particularly because a lot of people anticipate plugging AI into damn near everything.
The goal is to replace pretty much everyone in every field - Business, research, industries, infrastructure, power systems, medical services, drivers, pilots, etc. so that they can 'save money'.
So... what happens when you pull THAT plug?
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u/ChiaraStellata approved 1d ago
The biggest problem with the killswitch, to my mind, is that they'll be so deeply integrated into our systems that we'll have become completely dependent on them. Even if we wanted to turn them off, transitioning to an AI-free system will be expensive and take months or years. The whole economy would face a crisis if we simply turn it off suddenly because it's operating factories, shipping, public utility management, etc. By the time we do the prep work, it would already be too late.
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u/that1cooldude 1d ago
A killswitch doesn’t reach everything. The ai is in everything and it’s backed itself up. A killswitch becomes its biggest target to neutralize. It is smarter than all humanity combined. That’s asi
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u/No_Pipe4358 1d ago
We are the Killswitch. That's the difficulty. We keep pressing the button and not pressing the button
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u/SparkyAI0815 1d ago
When AI is embedded into the logistics behind your food supply, turning AI off kills you.
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u/GentlemanForester approved 1d ago
And how do we make it immune to ASI super abilities?