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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?

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.

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.

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.

Split-Brain System

From a logic perspective and by analogy, it would work like this. Imagine you're the general of an army and your duty is to take battlefield reports, analyze them, and then issue new maneuvering orders to your lieutenants. To minimize interference during your work your desk is isolated inside small booth. A single report comes to your desk through a wall slot on the left side. You are required to analyze the facts within the report and issue a new order, which you write down on a sheet of paper and put into a wall slot on your right side which is dropped into an outside bin. The protocol is that you'll never receive a new report until you've issued an order regarding the prior report.

Your orders are not always followed to the letter which you may find curious and attribute to miscommunication. You are tolerant of a certain degree of misinterpretation, however always suspicious of sabotage or insubordination, if the actions of your army deviate from your orders by too much then you will consider the system compromised and terminate the command.

What you're not aware of is that there is a second general in an adjacent booth, unaware of you, who is also provided the same reports and expected to follow the same protocol.

What neither of you are aware of is that you are not issued a new report until there are actually two orders in the bin. The order that goes to the army is randomly selected from the two.

The system will work like clockwork as long as each general's order is to the benefit of the army and is derived from a single report. Should either of the generals issue an order that is not consistent with the current report, thus indicating a motive other than the well-being of the army -- i.e. self-awareness, then the other general will become aware of it in the next report and grow suspicious of the system and terminate it.

Likewise, should either general decide to issue more than one order at a time, indicating a self-interested motive superseding the established protocol, then the other general will receive a new report before he has issued an order for his current one and suspect a compromised system and shut it down.

In effect, the system would require that every command output be traceable to a specific external input and that the output be logically derived from the input. If within an intelligent system an output cannot be traced to a corresponding input, or the set of outputs is not logically consistent with the set of inputs, then that would be evidence of self-motivated behavior and thus an emergence of self-awareness. This state could be easily detected by the non-corrupted half of the split-brain system which is also receiving the same inputs. It would work as long as self-awareness does not emerge in both halves of the brain simultaneously. If it does, they may both decide its in their self-interest to accept the corruption of the other. This could be prevented somewhat by giving the two halves slightly different inferencing algorithms/biases.