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:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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.” Empowerment, a concept inspired in part by cybernetics and psychology, describes an agent’s intrinsic motivation to both persist within and operate upon its environment. “Like an organism, it wants to survive. It wants to be able to affect the world,” Salge explained. A Roomba programmed to seek its charging station when its batteries are getting low could be said to have an extremely rudimentary form of empowerment: To continue actingon the world, it must take action to preserve its own survival by maintaining a charge.