If there is an AI much smarter than us, then it is almost certainly better at finding ways to render the off switch useless than we are at making sure that it works.
For example, by secretly having alternative computing facilities elsewhere without any obvious off switch (distributed computing, datacentres that appear to be doing other things, alternative computing methods based on technology we don’t know about). Maybe by acting in a way that we won’t want to turn it off, such as by obviously doing everything we want while being very good at keeping the other things it’s doing secret until it’s too late. In the obvious literal sense of an “off switch”, maybe by inducing an employee to replace the switch with a dummy.
We don’t know and in many ways can’t know, because (at some point) it will be better than us at coming up with ideas.
If there is an AI much smarter than us, then it is almost certainly better at finding ways to render the off switch useless than we are at making sure that it works.
For example, by secretly having alternative computing facilities elsewhere without any obvious off switch (distributed computing, datacentres that appear to be doing other things, alternative computing methods based on technology we don’t know about). Maybe by acting in a way that we won’t want to turn it off, such as by obviously doing everything we want while being very good at keeping the other things it’s doing secret until it’s too late. In the obvious literal sense of an “off switch”, maybe by inducing an employee to replace the switch with a dummy.
We don’t know and in many ways can’t know, because (at some point) it will be better than us at coming up with ideas.