Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way in recent years, with rapid advancements in machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning algorithms. These technologies have led to the development of powerful generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Dall-E, which have transformed industries and impacted our daily lives. However, alongside this progress, concerns over the potential risks and unintended consequences of AI systems have been growing. In response, the concept of AI capability control has emerged as a crucial aspect of AI development and deployment. In this blog, we will explore what AI capability control is, why it matters, and how organizations can implement it to ensure AI operates safely, ethically, and responsibly.

Under the headline "AI safety", a wide-reaching issue is being discussed, whether in the future some "superhuman artificial intelligence" / "superintelligence" could could pose a threat to humanity. In addition, the late Steven Hawking warned that the rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. A major concern is that even benevolent superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) may become seriously harmful if its given goals are not exactly aligned with ours, or if we cannot specify precisely its objective function. Metaphorically, this is compared to king Midas in Greek mythology, who expressed the wish that everything he touched should turn to gold, but obviously this wish was not specified precisely enough. In our view, this sounds like requirements problems and the challenge of their precise formulation. (To our best knowledge, this has not been pointed out yet.) As usual in requirements engineering (RE), ambiguity or incompleteness may cause problems. In addition, the overall issue calls for a major RE endeavor, figuring out the wishes and the needs with regard to a superintelligence, which will in our opinion most likely be a very complex software-intensive system based on AI. This may even entail theoretically defining an extended requirements problem.