A Playground for the Value Alignment Problem

Abstract

The popularity of some recent applications of AI has given rise to some concerns in society about the risks of AI. One response to these concerns has been the orientation of scientific and technological efforts towards a responsible development of AI. This stance has been articulated from different perspectives. One is to focus on the risks associated with the autonomy of artificial entities, and one way of making this focus operational is the “value-alignment problem” (VAP); namely, to study how this autonomy may become provably aligned with certain moral values. With this purpose in mind, we advocate the characterisation of a problem archetype to study how values may be imbued in autonomous artificially intelligent entities. The motivation is twofold, on one hand to decompose a complex problem to study simpler elements and, on the other, the successful precedents of this artifice in analogous contexts (e.g. chess for cognitive AI, RoboCup for intelligent robotics). We propose to use agent-based modelling of policy-making for this purpose because policy-making (i) constitutes a problem domain that is rich, accessible and evocative, (ii) one may claim that it is an essentially value-drive process and, (iii) it allows for a crisp differentiation of two complementary views of VAP: imbuing values in agents and imbuing values in the social system in order to foster value-aligned behaviour of the agents that act within the system. In this paper we elaborate the former argument, propose a characterisation of the archetype and identify research lines that may be systematically studied with this archetype.