Law, AI, and Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Croker: “Technology has been at the heart of two injustices that courts have labelled significant miscarriages of justice. The first example will be familiar now to many people in the UK: colloquially known as the ‘post office’ or ‘horizon’ scandal. The second is from Australia, where the Commonwealth Government sought to utilise AI to identify overpayment in the welfare system through what is colloquially known as the ‘Robodebt System’. The first example resulted in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in the UK legal system’s history. The second example was labelled “a shameful chapter” in government administration in Australia and led to the government unlawfully asserting debts amounting to $1.763 billion against 433,000 Australians, and is now the subject of a Royal Commission seeking to identify how public policy failures could have been made on such a significant scale.

Both examples show that where technology and AI goes wrong, the scale of the injustice can result in unprecedented impacts across societies….(More)”.

The Right To Be Free From Automation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Ziyaad Bhorat: “Is it possible to free ourselves from automation? The idea sounds fanciful, if not outright absurd. Industrial and technological development have reached a planetary level, and automation, as the general substitution or augmentation of human work with artificial tools capable of completing tasks on their own, is the bedrock of all the technologies designed to save, assist and connect us. 

From industrial lathes to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, automation is one of the most groundbreaking achievements in the history of humanity. As a consequence of the human ingenuity and imagination involved in automating our tools, the sky is quite literally no longer a limit. 

But in thinking about our relationship to automation in contemporary life, my unease has grown. And I’m not alone — America’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the European Union’s GDPR both express skepticism of automated tools and systems: The “use of technology, data and automated systems in ways that threaten the rights of the American public”; the “right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.” 

If we look a little deeper, we find this uneasy language in other places where people have been guarding three important abilities against automated technologies. Historically, we have found these abilities so important that we now include them in various contemporary rights frameworks: the right to work, the right to know and understand the source of the things we consume, and the right to make our own decisions. Whether we like it or not, therefore, communities and individuals are already asserting the importance of protecting people from the ubiquity of automated tools and systems.

Consider the case of one of South Africa’s largest retailers, Pick n Pay, which in 2016 tried to introduce self-checkout technology in its retail stores. In post-Apartheid South Africa, trade unions are immensely powerful and unemployment persistently high, so any retail firm that wants to introduce technology that might affect the demand for labor faces huge challenges. After the country’s largest union federation threatened to boycott the new Pick n Pay machines, the company scrapped its pilot. 

As the sociologist Christopher Andrews writes in “The Overworked Consumer,” self-checkout technology is by no means a universally good thing. Firms that introduce it need to deal with new forms of theft, maintenance and bottleneck, while customers end up doing more work themselves. These issues are in addition to the ill fortunes of displaced workers…(More)”.

The Law of AI for Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Orly Lobel: “Legal policy and scholarship are increasingly focused on regulating technology to safeguard against risks and harms, neglecting the ways in which the law should direct the use of new technology, and in particular artificial intelligence (AI), for positive purposes. This article pivots the debates about automation, finding that the focus on AI wrongs is descriptively inaccurate, undermining a balanced analysis of the benefits, potential, and risks involved in digital technology. Further, the focus on AI wrongs is normatively and prescriptively flawed, narrowing and distorting the law reforms currently dominating tech policy debates. The law-of-AI-wrongs focuses on reactive and defensive solutions to potential problems while obscuring the need to proactively direct and govern increasingly automated and datafied markets and societies. Analyzing a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report, the Biden administration’s 2022 AI Bill of Rights and American and European legislative reform efforts, including the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022, the Data Privacy and Protection Act of 2022, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the new draft EU AI Act, the article finds that governments are developing regulatory strategies that almost exclusively address the risks of AI while paying short shrift to its benefits. The policy focus on risks of digital technology is pervaded by logical fallacies and faulty assumptions, failing to evaluate AI in comparison to human decision-making and the status quo. The article presents a shift from the prevailing absolutist approach to one of comparative cost-benefit. The role of public policy should be to oversee digital advancements, verify capabilities, and scale and build public trust in the most promising technologies.

A more balanced regulatory approach to AI also illuminates tensions between current AI policies. Because AI requires better, more representative data, the right to privacy can conflict with the right to fair, unbiased, and accurate algorithmic decision-making. This article argues that the dominant policy frameworks regulating AI risks—emphasizing the right to human decision-making (human-in-the-loop) and the right to privacy (data minimization)—must be complemented with new corollary rights and duties: a right to automated decision-making (human-out-of-the-loop) and a right to complete and connected datasets (data maximization). Moreover, a shift to proactive governance of AI reveals the necessity for behavioral research on how to establish not only trustworthy AI, but also human rationality and trust in AI. Ironically, many of the legal protections currently proposed conflict with existing behavioral insights on human-machine trust. The article presents a blueprint for policymakers to engage in the deliberate study of how irrational aversion to automation can be mitigated through education, private-public governance, and smart policy design…(More)”

Americans Can’t Consent to Companies Use of their Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Report from the Annenberg School for Communication: “Consent has always been a central part of Americans’ interactions with the commercial internet. Federal and state laws, as well as decisions from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), require either implicit (“opt out”) or explicit (“opt in”) permission from individuals for companies to take and use data about them. Genuine opt out and opt in consent requires that people have knowledge about commercial data-extraction practices as well as a belief they can do something about them. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the commercial internet, the latest Annenberg national survey finds that Americans have neither. High percentages of Americans don’t know, admit they don’t know, and believe they can’t do anything about basic practices and policies around companies’ use of people’s data…
High levels of frustration, concern, and fear compound Americans’ confusion: 80% say they have little control over how marketers can learn about them online; 80% agree that what companies know about them from their online behaviors can harm them. These and related discoveries from our survey paint a picture of an unschooled and admittedly incapable society that rejects the internet industry’s insistence that people will accept tradeoffs for benefits and despairs of its inability to predictably control its digital life in the face of powerful corporate forces. At a time when individual consent lies at the core of key legal frameworks governing the collection and use of personal information, our findings describe an environment where genuine consent may not be possible….The aim of this report is to chart the particulars of Americans’ lack of knowledge about the commercial use of their data and their “dark resignation” in connection to it. Our goal is also to raise questions and suggest solutions about public policies that allow companies to gather, analyze, trade, and otherwise benefit from information they extract from large populations of people who are uninformed about how that information will be used and deeply concerned about the consequences of its use. In short, we find that informed consent at scale is a myth, and we urge policymakers to act with that in mind.”…(More)”.

‘Neurorights’ and the next flashpoint of medical privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alex LaCasse: “Around the world, leading neuroscientists, neuroethicists, privacy advocates and legal minds are taking greater interest in brain data and its potential.

Opinions vary widely on the long-term advancements in technology designed to measure brain activity and their impacts on society, as new products trickle out of clinical settings and gain traction for commercial applications.

Some say alarm bells should already be sounding and argue the technology could have corrosive effects on democratic society. Others counter such claims are hyperbolic, given the uncertainty that technology can even measure certain brain activities in the purported way.

Today, neurotechnology is primarily confined to medical and research settings, with the use of various clinical-grade devices to monitor the brain activity of patients who may suffer from mental illnesses or paralysis to gauge muscle movement and record electroencephalography (the measurement of electrical activity and motor function in the brain)….

“I intentionally don’t call this neurorights or brain rights. I call it cognitive liberty,” Duke University Law and Philosophy Professor Nita Farahany said during a LinkedIn Live session. “There is promise of this technology, not only for people who are struggling with a loss of speech and loss of motor activity, but for everyday people.”

The jumping-off point of the panel centered around Farahany’s new book, “The Battle for Your Brain: The Ability to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology,” which examines the neurotechnology landscape and potential negative outcomes without regulatory oversight.

Farahany was motivated to write the book because she saw a “chasm” between what she thought neurotechnology was capable of and the reality of some companies working to one day decode people’s inner thoughts on some level…(More)” (Book)”.

Mapping and Comparing Data Governance Frameworks: A benchmarking exercise to inform global data governance deliberations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sara Marcucci, Natalia Gonzalez Alarcon, Stefaan G. Verhulst, Elena Wullhorst: “Data has become a critical resource for organizations and society. Yet, it is not always as valuable as it could be since there is no well-defined approach to managing and using it. This article explores the increasing importance of global data governance due to the rapid growth of data and the need for responsible data use and protection. While historically associated with private organizational governance, data governance has evolved to include governmental and institutional bodies. However, the lack of a global consensus and fragmentation in policies and practices pose challenges to the development of a common framework. The purpose of this report is to compare approaches and identify patterns in the emergent and fragmented data governance ecosystem within sectors close to the international development field, ultimately presenting key takeaways and reflections on when and why a global data governance framework may be needed. Overall, the report highlights the need for a more holistic, coordinated transnational approach to data governance to manage the global flow of data responsibly and for the public interest. The article begins by giving an overview of the current fragmented data governance ecology, to then proceed to illustrate the methodology used. Subsequently, the paper illustrates the most relevant findings stemming from the research. These are organized according to six key elements: (a) purpose, (b) principles, (c) anchoring documents, (d) data description and lifecycle, (e) processes, and (f) practices. Finally, the article closes with a series of key takeaways and final reflections…(More)”.

The Future of Human Agency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Pew Research: “Advances in the internet, artificial intelligence (AI) and online applications have allowed humans to vastly expand their capabilities and increase their capacity to tackle complex problems. These advances have given people the ability to instantly access and share knowledge and amplified their personal and collective power to understand and shape their surroundings. Today there is general agreement that smart machines, bots and systems powered mostly by machine learning and artificial intelligence will quickly increase in speed and sophistication between now and 2035.

As individuals more deeply embrace these technologies to augment, improve and streamline their lives, they are continuously invited to outsource more decision-making and personal autonomy to digital tools.

Some analysts have concerns about how business, government and social systems are becoming more automated. They fear humans are losing the ability to exercise judgment and make decisions independent of these systems.

Others optimistically assert that throughout history humans have generally benefited from technological advances. They say that when problems arise, new regulations, norms and literacies help ameliorate the technology’s shortcomings. And they believe these harnessing forces will take hold, even as automated digital systems become more deeply woven into daily life.

Thus the question: What is the future of human agency? Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts to share their insights on this; 540 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, academics and activists responded. Specifically, they were asked:

By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives?

The results of this nonscientific canvassing:

  • 56% of these experts agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will not be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.
  • 44% said they agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.

It should be noted that in explaining their answers, many of these experts said the future of these technologies will have both positive and negative consequences for human agency. They also noted that through the ages, people have either allowed other entities to make decisions for them or have been forced to do so by tribal and national authorities, religious leaders, government bureaucrats, experts and even technology tools themselves…(More)”.

ChatGPT reminds us why good questions matter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Anil Ananthaswamy: “Over 100 million people used ChatGPT in January alone, according to one estimate, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. By producing resumes, essays, jokes and even poetry in response to prompts, the software brings into focus not just language models’ arresting power, but the importance of framing our questions correctly.

To that end, a few years ago I initiated the 100 Questions Initiative, which seeks to catalyse a cultural shift in the way we leverage data and develop scientific insights. The project aims not only to generate new questions, but also reimagine the process of asking them…

As a species and a society, we tend to look for answers. Answers appear to provide a sense of clarity and certainty, and can help guide our actions and policy decisions. Yet any answer represents a provisional end-stage of a process that begins with questions – and often can generate more questions. Einstein drew attention to the critical importance of how questions are framed, which can often determine (or at least play a significant role in determining) the answers we ultimately reach. Frame a question differently and one might reach a different answer. Yet as a society we undervalue the act of questioning – who formulates questions, how they do so, the impact they have on what we investigate, and on the decisions we make. Nor do we pay sufficient attention to whether the answers are in fact addressing the questions initially posed…(More)”.

‘There is no standard’: investigation finds AI algorithms objectify women’s bodies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hilke Schellmann: “Images posted on social media are analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that decide what to amplify and what to suppress. Many of these algorithms, a Guardian investigation has found, have a gender bias, and may have been censoring and suppressing the reach of countless photos featuring women’s bodies.

These AI tools, developed by large technology companies, including Google and Microsoft, are meant to protect users by identifying violent or pornographic visuals so that social media companies can block it before anyone sees it. The companies claim that their AI tools can also detect “raciness” or how sexually suggestive an image is. With this classification, platforms – including Instagram and LinkedIn – may suppress contentious imagery.

Two Guardian journalists used the AI tools to analyze hundreds of photos of men and women in underwear, working out, using medical tests with partial nudity and found evidence that the AI tags photos of women in everyday situations as sexually suggestive. They also rate pictures of women as more “racy” or sexually suggestive than comparable pictures of men. As a result, the social media companies that leverage these or similar algorithms have suppressed the reach of countless images featuring women’s bodies, and hurt female-led businesses – further amplifying societal disparities.

Even medical pictures are affected by the issue. The AI algorithms were tested on images released by the US National Cancer Institute demonstrating how to do a clinical breast examination. Google’s AI gave this photo the highest score for raciness, Microsoft’s AI was 82% confident that the image was “explicitly sexual in nature”, and Amazon classified it as representing “explicit nudity”…(More)”.

Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Carissa Veliz and Steven M. Cahn: “Companies collect and share much of your daily life, from your location and search history, to your likes, habits, and relationships. As more and more of our personal data is collected, analyzed, and distributed, we need to think carefully about what we might be losing when we give up our privacy.

Privacy is a thought-provoking collection of philosophical essays on privacy, offering deep insights into the nature of privacy, its value, and the consequences of its loss. Bringing together both classic and contemporary work, this timely volume explores the theories, issues, debates, and applications of the philosophical study of privacy. The essays address concealment and exposure, the liberal value of privacy, privacy in social media, privacy rights and public information, privacy and the limits of law, and more…(More)”.