If AI attempts to take over world, don’t count on a ‘kill switch’ to save humanity

When it was reported last month that Anthropic’s Claude had resorted to blackmail and other self-preservation techniques to avoid being shut down, alarm bells went off in the AI community.Anthropic researchers say that making the models misbehave (“misalignment” in industry parlance) is part of making them safer. Still, the Claude episodes raise the question: Is there any way to turn off AI once it surpasses the threshold of being more intelligent than humans, or so-called superintelligence?AI, with its sprawling data centers and ability to craft complex conversations, is already beyond the point of a physical failsafe or “kill switch” —...