4.” By the 1910s, big dystopian buttons had begun to appear in the work of sci fi authors like H.G. In 1896, a Parisian newspaper published a satirical account of Thomas Edison destroying London by pressing “button No. In a recent research paper, it warned that “reinforcement learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are unlikely to behave optimally all the time,” and said it “may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions.”Ĭulturally, the idea of the irresistible, apocalyptic button has been around even longer. (Yes, there was literally a guy with an axe standing by.)Īlphabet’s DeepMind unit, which has developed AIs capable of learning on their own and beating humans at board games, is also nervous about creating adverse consequences. We wrote about that in a Quartz Obsession. The acronym stands for “safety control rod axe man,” which was supposedly coined by Enrico Fermi when the world’s first nuclear reactor was built at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. Nuclear reactors have a failsafe red button known as a “SCRAM” switch, which inserts control rods into the core to halt a runaway nuclear reaction. Where big red buttons do exist-and for good reason-is on technologies that might need to be shut down to avert a disaster (not create one): nuclear reactors have them so to, for that matter, do treadmills. “He might never push the button.” Where did the big red button come from? The Pentagon thought this was a terrible idea: “Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment,” Fisher’s contacts replied.

The President says, “‘George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.’ He has to look at someone and realize what death is-what an innocent death is. “If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being.

Instead of keeping nuclear codes in a suitcase, you’d implant them in the heart of a volunteer, who’d carry with him a “big, heavy butcher knife,” Fisher wrote.

In the 1960s, Harvard Law School professor Roger Fisher proposed an idea to friends in the Pentagon, which he later wrote about in a fascinating piece published in Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences.

Trump red button cartoon