Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is a busy man, but not busy enough to also involve himself in the world of A.I. In an op-ed for Slate, Nadella channels Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics to come up with “principles and goals” that he believes both industry and society must debate around the emergence of A.I.

Nadella includes the following:

• A.I. must be designed to assist humanity: As we build more autonomous machines, we need to respect human autonomy. Collaborative robots, or co-bots, should do dangerous work like mining, thus creating a safety net and safeguards for human workers.

• A.I. must be transparent. “The tech will know things about humans, but the humans must know about the machines. People should have an understanding of how the technology sees and analyses the world,” Nadella notes.

• A.I. must maximise efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people. Nadella believes, “We need broader, deeper, and more diverse engagement of populations in the design of these systems. The tech industry should not dictate the values and virtues of this future.”

• A.I. must be designed for intelligent privacy – sophisticated protections that secure personal and group information in ways that earn trust.

• A.I. must have algorithmic accountability so that humans can undo unintended harm. We must design these technologies for the expected and the unexpected.

• A.I. must guard against bias, ensuring proper, and representative research so that the wrong heuristics cannot be used to discriminate.

But, as there are requirements for our machine friends, so Nadella also places responsibilities on humans, believing that in order to stay “relevant” kids need empathy, education, creativity, as well as judgement and accountability.

Nadella further states that when it comes to A.I., there’s no clear map of what’s actually lying ahead. According to him, the most important next step, however, is to agree on both an ethical and empathic framework for the design of A.I.

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