  Autonomous agents trained via reinforcement learning present numerous safety
concerns: reward hacking, negative side effects, and unsafe exploration, among
others. In the context of near-future autonomous agents, operating in
environments where humans understand the existing dangers, human involvement in
the learning process has proved a promising approach to AI Safety. Here we
demonstrate that a precise framework for learning from human input, loosely
inspired by the way humans parent children, solves a broad class of safety
problems in this context. We show that our Parenting algorithm solves these
problems in the relevant AI Safety gridworlds of Leike et al. (2017), that an
agent can learn to outperform its parent as it "matures", and that policies
learnt through Parenting are generalisable to new environments.
