Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Rights: The Dawn of New Regulation

In the last few years, we have seen widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) both by private and public agencies. Increasingly, AI is used to make important decisions including whom to hire for a job, what unemployment benefits someone gets, predicting where or when a crime might occur, whether a defendant is likely to re-offend and ought to be denied bail, how long a person might be in jail, whether someone is at risk of cancer, or who sees an advertisement for a specific job. While these uses generate some societal gains, they also raise several concerns about the fundamental rights of individuals due to the lack of transparency of the systems, risks of discrimination, and manipulation. Despite the heightened risks to fundamental rights, AI governance discourse has primarily focused on ethical frameworks and a patchwork of data and consumer protection rules. This is changing, and we are now seeing countries enacting laws specifically targeting AI. For example, in April 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal for a Regulation on AI. This is the first initiative towards a comprehensive legal framework on AI in the world and aims to guarantee the highest level of protection for fundamental rights and safety while promoting innovation. In this talk, we will look at some of the challenges to fundamental rights resulting from the increasing deployment of AI and how the draft EU AI Act tries to tackle some of the concerns.