Negative Human Rights as a Basis for Long-term AI Safety and Regulation
This addresses the need for widely accepted and specific principles to prevent harmful AI behaviors, though it is incremental by drawing from existing legal concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring autonomous AI systems are reliably safe in novel situations by proposing negative human rights as guiding principles, which could serve as a foundation for international regulation and technical safety constraints.
If autonomous AI systems are to be reliably safe in novel situations, they will need to incorporate general principles guiding them to recognize and avoid harmful behaviours. Such principles may need to be supported by a binding system of regulation, which would need the underlying principles to be widely accepted. They should also be specific enough for technical implementation. Drawing inspiration from law, this article explains how negative human rights could fulfil the role of such principles and serve as a foundation both for an international regulatory system and for building technical safety constraints for future AI systems.