Empowerment As Replacement for the Three Laws of Robotics

The greater ubiquity of robots creates a need for generic guidelines for robot behavior. How should a heuristic look like to motivate the robot's behavior in interaction with human agents? This article makes a concrete, operational proposal as to how the information-theoretic concept of empowerment can be used as a generic heuristic to quantify concepts, such as self-preservation, protection of the human partner, and responding to human actions.