Law Informs Code: A Legal Informatics Approach to Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humans

Understand

We are currently unable to specify human goals and societal values in a way that reliably directs AI behavior.

• Law-making and legal interpretation form a computational engine that converts opaque human values into legible directives.
• "Law Informs Code" is the research agenda embedding legal knowledge and reasoning in AI.
• Similar to how parties to a legal contract cannot foresee every potential contingency of their future relationship, and legislators cannot predict all the circumstances under which their proposed bills will be applied, we cannot ex ante specify rules that provably direct good AI behavior.