Research Agenda for Sociotechnical Approaches to AI Safety

Abstract

As the capabilities of AI systems continue to advance, it is increasingly important that we guide the development of these powerful technologies, ensuring they are used for the benefit of society. Existing work analyzing and assessing risks from AI spans a broad and diverse range of perspectives, including some which diverge enough in their motivations and approaches that they disagree on priorities and desired solutions. Yet we find significant overlap among these perspectives' desire for beneficial outcomes from AI deployment, and significant potential for progress towards such outcomes in the examination of that overlap. In this paper we explore one such area of overlap: we discuss areas of AI safety work that could benefit from sociotechnical framings of AI, which view AI systems as embedded in larger sociotechnical systems, and which explore the potential risks and benefits of AI not just as aspects of these new tools, but as possibilities for the complex interactions between humans and our technologies. We present a collection of proposals we believe to be promising directions for including sociotechnical approaches in the pursuit of safe and beneficial AI, demonstrating the potential value of such approaches in addressing the harms, risks, and benefits of current and future AI systems.

Keywords: AI, Artificial Intelligence, AI Ethics, AI Safety, Science & Technology Studies, AI Governance, sociotechnical, research, AI systems, social welfare, interpretability, RLHF