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 acting on the world, it must take action to preserve its own survival by maintaining a charge.
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