Can N-Version Decision-Making Prevent the Rebirth of HAL 9000 in Military Camo? Using a “Golden Rule” Threshold to Prevent AI Mission Individuation

The promise of AIs that can target, shoot at, and eliminate enemies in the blink of an eye, brings about the possibility that such AIs can turn rogue and create an adversarial “Skynet.” The main danger is not that AIs might turn against us because they hate us, but because they think they want to be like us: individuals. The solution might be to treat them like individuals. This should include the right and obligation to do unto others as any AI would want other AIs or humans to do unto them. Technically, this involves an N-version decision making process that takes into account not how good or efficient the decision of an AI is, but how likely the AI is to show algorithmic “respect” to other AIs or human rules and operators. In this paper, we discuss a possible methodology for deploying AI decision making that uses multiple AI actors to check on each other to prevent “mission individuation,” i.e., the AIs wanting to complete the mission even if the human operators are sacrificed. The solution envisages mechanisms that demand the AIs to “do unto others as others would do onto them” in making final solutions. This should encourage AIs to accept critique and censoring in certain situations and most important it should lead to decisions that protect both human operators and the final goal of the mission.