  Characterizing human values is a topic deeply interwoven with the sciences,
humanities, art, and many other human endeavors. In recent years, a number of
thinkers have argued that accelerating trends in computer science, cognitive
science, and related disciplines foreshadow the creation of intelligent
machines which meet and ultimately surpass the cognitive abilities of human
beings, thereby entangling an understanding of human values with future
technological development. Contemporary research accomplishments suggest
sophisticated AI systems becoming widespread and responsible for managing many
aspects of the modern world, from preemptively planning users' travel schedules
and logistics, to fully autonomous vehicles, to domestic robots assisting in
daily living. The extrapolation of these trends has been most forcefully
described in the context of a hypothetical "intelligence explosion," in which
the capabilities of an intelligent software agent would rapidly increase due to
the presence of feedback loops unavailable to biological organisms. The
possibility of superintelligent agents, or simply the widespread deployment of
sophisticated, autonomous AI systems, highlights an important theoretical
problem: the need to separate the cognitive and rational capacities of an agent
from the fundamental goal structure, or value system, which constrains and
guides the agent's actions. The "value alignment problem" is to specify a goal
structure for autonomous agents compatible with human values. In this brief
article, we suggest that recent ideas from affective neuroscience and related
disciplines aimed at characterizing neurological and behavioral universals in
the mammalian class provide important conceptual foundations relevant to
describing human values. We argue that the notion of "mammalian value systems"
points to a potential avenue for fundamental research in AI safety and AI
ethics.
