Designing AI Objectives to Preserve Human Empowerment

A recent paper on arXiv introduces a framework for artificial intelligence systems that focuses on enhancing human empowerment while balancing the dynamics between humans and AI. The authors, hailing from the computer science field, adopt a principled and partially axiomatic methodology to create a parametrizable and decomposable objective function. This function captures a long-term aggregate of human power that is both risk-averse and inequality-sensitive. It accommodates models of human bounded rationality and social norms, reflecting diverse human objectives. The study demonstrates how certain desired outcomes dictate specific functional forms and limit parameter ranges, illustrating the implications of maximizing this metric in various scenarios. This research addresses increasing worries regarding AI's effects on human autonomy and well-being, providing a formal approach to align AI actions with human empowerment. The paper can be found on arXiv with the identifier 2608.08240 and includes references, citations, and links to relevant code and data. This work contributes to ongoing initiatives to ethically design AI systems, especially in the context of human-AI interactions.