Modelling Human Values for AI Reasoning

In academia, a growing body of research investigates the role of human values in designing ethical AI [12, 31, 74, 90]. Indeed, one of our leading AI research luminaries, Stuart Russell, believes the overarching goal of AI should change from "intelligence" to "intelligence provably aligned with human values" [74]. This call to arms gave birth to the value alignment problem. This challenge of engineering values into AI in response to the value alignment problem has resulted in a range of research areas: how human values can be learnt [43, 44, 45, 91]; how individual values can be aggregated to the level of groups [41]; how arguments that explicitly reference values can be made [7]; how decision making can be value-driven [14, 17, 21]; how online institutions can ensure value-aligned behaviours in hybrid communities [56, 57]; and how norms are selected or synthesised to maximise value-alignment [55, 80, 83]. Yet despite these efforts, no formal model of values exists today that provides a concrete foundational platform from which data structures and algorithms can be designed to build AI architectures that address the valuealignment problem. In response, we propose such a model built on the following guiding principles: 1) we employ a formal language to be precise about modelling values and related concepts [23, 47]; 2) we construct the formal components of this model to provide the foundations for the data structures and algorithmic design that will enable value-based reasoning; 3) we design the model to be agnostic on any specific implementation of values, though we do provide example implementation scenarios to illustrate the model's ubiquity and practical applicability; 4) we set out the model to subsume and relate to established concepts in AI research as much as possible; 5) we provide illustrative examples of building data structures and algorithms enabling value-based reasoning taken from our ongoing research applied to real-world use cases; 6) we ensure the model draws upon the wealth of work from within social psychology and explicitly demonstrate the grounding of our model within this research; and