Artificial Intelligence: Approaches to Safety
William D’Alessandro, Cameron Domenico Kirk‐Giannini · Philosophy Compass · 2025
ABSTRACT AI safety is an interdisciplinary field focused on mitigating the harms caused by AI systems. We review a range of research directions in AI safety, focusing on those to which philosophers have made or are in a position to make the most significant contributions. These include ethical AI , which seeks to instill human goals, values, and ethical principles into artificial systems, scalable oversight , which seeks to develop methods for supervising the activity of artificial systems even when they become significantly more capable than their human designers, interpretability , which seeks to render comprehensible the workings of complex machine learning models, and corrigibility , which seeks to discover ways to ensure that powerful AI systems will not resist being shut down or modified by humans.