The promises and challenges of addressing artificial intelligence with human rights

Abstract

This paper examines the potential promises and limitations of the human rights framework in the age of AI. It addresses the question: what, if anything, makes human rights well suited to face the challenges arising from new and emerging technologies like AI? It argues that the historical evolution of human rights as a series of legal norms and concrete practices has made it well placed to address AI-related challenges. The human rights framework should be understood comprehensively as a combination of legal remedies, moral justification, and political analysis that inform one another. Over time, the framework has evolved in ways that accommodate the balancing of contending rights claims, using multiple ex ante and ex post facto mechanisms, involving government and/or business actors, and in situations of diffuse responsibility that may or may not result from malicious intent. However, the widespread adoption of AI technologies pushes the moral, sociological, and political boundaries of the human rights framework in other ways. AI reproduces long-term, structural problems going beyond issue-by-issue regulation, is embedded within economic structures that produce cumulative negative effects, and introduces additional challenges that require a discussion about the relationship between human rights and science & technology. Some of the reasons for why AI produces problematic outcomes are deep rooted in technical intricacies that human rights practitioners should be more willing than before to get involved in.