Designing AI Systems that Obey Our Laws and Values

Operational AI systems (for example, self-driving cars) need to obey both the law of the land and our values. We propose AI oversight systems ("AI Guardians") as an approach to addressing this challenge, and to respond to the potential risks associated with increasingly autonomous AI systems.a These AI oversight systems serve to verify that operational systems did not stray unduly from the guidelines of their programmers and to bring them back in compliance if they do stray. The introduction of such second-order, oversight systems is not meant to suggest strict, powerful, or rigid (from here on'strong') controls. Operations systems need a great degree of latitude in order to follow the lessons of their learning from additional data mining and experience and to be able to render at least semi-autonomous decisions (more about this later).