Safe AI -- How is this Possible?

A new generation of increasingly autonomous and self-learning cyber-physical systems (CPS) is being developed for control applications in the real world. These systems are AI-based in that they leverage techniques from the field of Artificial intelligence (AI) to flexibly cope with imprecision, inconsistency, incompleteness, to have an inherent ability to learn from experience, and to adapt according to changing and even unforeseen situations. This extra flexibility of AI systems makes it harder to predict their behavior. Moreover, AI systems usually are safety-critical in that they may be causing real harm in (and to) the real world. Consequently, the central question regarding the development of such systems is how to handle or even overcome this basic dichotomy between unpredictable and safe behavior of AI systems. In other words, how can we best construct systems that exploit AI techniques, without incurring the frailties of "AI-like" behavior?