Computational Law, Symbolic Discourse, and the AI Constitution

How should we tell AIs what we want? For the past few decades, the Wolfram Language has been developed as a computational communication language to provide a bridge between human goals and computational capabilities. The Wolfram Language is becoming a full symbolic discourse language that can capture the kinds of human intentions we find in laws and contracts. If we want to tell AIs to “be nice to humans,” how should we actually do that? This chapter first discusses how the development of symbolic discourse language can make it possible to express such ideas. It then considers how we might approach building an AI constitution that defines how we want AIs to act and what ethics they should follow. This chapter also discusses some of the fundamental issues around having a complete computational legal or ethical system.