  It is possible that powerful and potentially dangerous artificial
intelligence (AI) might be developed in the future. An Oracle is a design which
aims to restrain the impact of a potentially dangerous AI by restricting the
agent to no actions besides answering questions. Unfortunately, most Oracles
will be motivated to gain more control over the world by manipulating users
through the content of their answers, and Oracles of potentially high
intelligence might be very successful at this
\citep{DBLP:journals/corr/AlfonsecaCACAR16}. In this paper we present two
designs for Oracles which, even under pessimistic assumptions, will not
manipulate their users into releasing them and yet will still be incentivised
to provide their users with helpful answers. The first design is the
counterfactual Oracle -- which choses its answer as if it expected nobody to
ever read it. The second design is the low-bandwidth Oracle -- which is limited
by the quantity of information it can transmit.

Artificial Intelligence