How to Build a Robot That Won't Take Over the World

Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics--constraints on the behavior of androids and automatons meant to ensure the safety of humans--were also famously incomplete. The laws, which first appeared in his 1942 short story "Runaround" and again in classic works like I, Robot, sound airtight at first: Of course, hidden conflicts and loopholes abound (which was Asimov's point). In our current age of advanced machine-learning software and autonomous robotics, defining and implementing an airtight set of ethics for artificial intelligence has become a pressing concern for organizations like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and OpenAI. Christoph Salge, a computer scientist currently at New York University, is taking a different approach. Instead of pursuing top-down philosophical definitions of how artificial agents should or shouldn't behave, Salge and his colleague Daniel Polani are investigating a bottom-up path, or "what a robot should do in the first place," as they write in their recent paper, "Empowerment as Replacement for the Three Laws of Robotics."