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, and an entirely new paradigm will have to have been invented.

Modern AI systems are spun up to solve specific, locally defined, generally speaking measurable-outcome tasks. Spinning one up is like deploying the Navy SEALS, and also like beginning open-heart surgery, where the patient whose vitals are being monitored is life as we know it.

Safety is hard to quantify. This is where the heuristics come in. And the distributed systems, and the election integrity.

For the most part, safety is defined by its inverse. If anything slips outside of some heuristic window, the process is halted. For example, if too few people in the general public approve of what the AI is doing: process stops. Process stops means: machines shut down, thermite ignited, fingerprints published to globally synchronized zero-knowledge content blacklist, physical archives sealed and locked in an underground vault whose cumulative contents are now or soon expected to be many orders of magnitude more dangerous than all of the planet’s collected nuclear waste. This is not considered a failure or an erroneous outcome — it is the expected and normal way that an AI project terminates. Again, generally speaking, within days of startup. A killswitch is just a good off button.

So — too few people approve: process stops. Too many people approve: process stops. Delta of approval ratings changes too fast: process stops. Not enough (or too many) people check in at once in any given time frame: process stops. Too much unusual stock market activity in the relevant sectors: process stops. Any of the three redundant monitoring systems experience outages outside of an ac...

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