Superintelligence Safety: A Requirements Engineering Perspective

TL;DR

This paper discusses superintelligence safety through the lens of requirements engineering, emphasizing the importance of precise goal specification to prevent harmful outcomes from AI systems.

Contribution

It highlights the analogy between AI goal specification and requirements problems, proposing a new perspective on AI safety challenges from requirements engineering.

Findings

Aligning AI goals with human values is a complex requirements problem.

Ambiguity in goal specification can lead to unintended harmful behaviors.

A comprehensive RE approach is needed for superintelligence safety.

Abstract

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.