Epistemic status: fiction. Speculative fiction. But that said, perhaps very near-term speculative fiction, and perhaps somewhere on the way to the borderline between "fiction" and "design document."
An AI killswitch bears almost no resemblance to most of its physical analogs. It has less in common with fuses or airbags, more with distributed systems, election integrity processes, or heart monitors.
The design goal is simple enough to specify: give the system as wide an operating envelope as possible without compromising safety, at a satisfactory reliability threshold.
How much envelope are we talking? In recent memory, weeks, even months. These days, more like days. Soon enough, we expect hours. Beyond that, current methods will not be viable,... (read 778 more words →)