Theories of Parenting and their Application to Artificial Intelligence

Parenting frameworks offer novel ethical guidance for AI development: The paper argues that theories of parenting—particularly those emphasizing nurturing agents with different values and experiences than their creators—provide useful principles for developing increasingly autonomous AI systems, suggesting this lens could complement existing ethics-focused ML research.

Current AI systems already embed creator values that affect human lives: The authors note that machine learning systems have "acquired more power over humans' lives" and that "questions about what values are embedded in them have become more complex and fraught," indicating that value alignment is not merely a future concern but an immediate practical issue in deployed systems today.

Preparing for AGI requires rethinking the creator-creation relationship: The paper proposes that if artificial general intelligence becomes feasible, humans must consciously design systems whose "experiences, objectives and understanding of the world will necessarily be very different from their parents'"—suggesting that attempting to create AGI in humanity's image may be misguided.

A spectrum of parenting principles should guide AI design and deployment: Rather than offering a single approach, the authors propose multiple principles across a spectrum, some applicable to current ML research and others relevant only if AGI development accelerates, allowing flexibility as the field evolves.

AI development requires intentional choices about autonomy and values: The framework emphasizes that decisions about "development, design, training, and release" of autonomous agents should be guided by conscious principles about what kind of agents we want to create, rather than allowing values to be embedded implicitly.