A Computational Framework for Human Values

There is an increasing recognition of the need to engineer AI that respects and embodies human values. The value alignment problem, which identifies that need, has led to a growing body of research that investigates value learning, the aggregation of individual values into the values of groups, the alignment of norms with values, and the design of other computational mechanisms that reason over values in general. Yet despite these efforts, no foundational, computational model of human values has been proposed. In response, we propose a model for the computational representation of human values that builds upon a sustained body of research from social psychology.