Good and safe uses of AI Oracles

It is possible that powerful and potentially dangerous artificial intelligence (AI) might be developed in the future (Russell et al., 2016) (Grace et al., 2017). An Oracle is a design which aims to restrain the impact of a potentially dangerous AI by restricting the agent to no actions besides answering questions (Babcock et al., 2016). Unfortunately, most Oracles will be motivated to gain more control over the world by manipulating users through the content of their answers, and Oracles of potentially high intelligence might be very successful at this (Alfonseca et al., 2016). In this paper we present two designs for Oracles which, even under pessimistic assumptions, will not manipulate their users into releasing them and yet will still be incentivised to provide their users with helpful answers. The first design is the counterfactual Oracle - which choses its answer as if it expected nobody to ever read it. The second design is the low-bandwidth Oracle - which is limited by the quantity of information it can transmit.