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Towards Requirements Engineering for Superintelligence Safety

Under the headline “AI safety”, a wide-reaching issue is being discussed, whether in the future some “superhuman artificial intelligence” / “superintelligence” 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. Both the definition and communication of such goals have to be conducted with extreme caution. 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. As usual in requirements engineering (RE), ambiguity or incompleteness may cause problems. That is why we actually propose (and partly work on already) yet another RE problem, 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. To our best knowledge, this view of “AI safety” has not been pointed out yet. Requirements engineering appears to be the right approach to address it first, preferably before serious attempts of building “superhuman artificial intelligence” are being conducted.