Full Abstract: Abstract We survey eight research areas organized around one question: As learning systems become increasingly intelligent and autonomous, what design principles can best ensure that their behavior is aligned with the interests of the operators? We focus on two major technical obstacles to AI alignment: the challenge of specifying the right kind of objective functions, and the challenge of designing AI systems that avoid unintended consequences and undesirable behavior even in cases where the objective function does not line up perfectly with the intentions of the designers. Open problems surveyed in this research proposal include: How can we train reinforcement learners to take actions that are more amenable to meaningful assessment by intelligent overseers? What kinds of objective functions incen- tivize a system to “not have an overly large impact” or “not have many side effects”? We discuss these questions, related work, and potential directions for future research, with the goal of highlighting relevant research topics in machine learning that appear tractable today.