Artificial Intelligence, Social Harms and Human Rights

281 Pages·2023·4.636 MB·English

by  Aleš Završnik, Katja Simončič

CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Artificial Intelligence,
Social Harms and
Human Rights
Edited by
Aleš Završnik · Katja Simončič
Critical Criminological Perspectives
Series Editors
Reece Walters, Faculty of Law, Deakin University,
Burwood, VIC, Australia
Deborah H. Drake, Department of Social Policy &
Criminology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
The Palgrave Critical Criminological Perspectives book series aims to
showcase the importance of critical criminological thinking when exam-
ining problems of crime, social harm and criminal and social justice.
Critical perspectives have been instrumental in creating new research
agendas and areas of criminological interest. By challenging state defined
concepts of crime and rejecting positive analyses of criminality, critical
criminological approaches continually push the boundaries and scope
of criminology, creating new areas of focus and developing new ways
of thinking about, and responding to, issues of social concern at local,
national and global levels. Recent years have witnessed a flourishing
of critical criminological narratives and this series seeks to capture the
original and innovative ways that these discourses are engaging with
contemporary issues of crime and justice. For further information on
the series and to submit a proposal for consideration, please get in touch
with the Editor: Josephine Taylor, [email protected].
ˇ ˇ · ˇ ˇ
Ales Zavrsnik Katja Simoncic
Editors
Artificial Intelligence,
Social Harms
and Human Rights
Editors
Aleš Završnik Katja Simoncˇicˇ
Institute of Criminology at the Faculty Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs
of Law and Equal Opportunities of the Republic
Ljubljana, Slovenia of Slovenia
Ljubljana, Slovenia
ISSN 2731-0604 ISSN 2731-0612 (electronic)
Critical Criminological Perspectives
ISBN 978-3-031-19148-0 ISBN 978-3-031-19149-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19149-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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Preface
Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings numerous benefits to individuals, busi-
nesses, and countries, for example, when social networks recommend
friends, when algorithms perform transactions on stock exchanges, when
AI helps law enforcement agencies predict crime or the military search
for potential terrorists. However, all these examples demonstrate how
these AI systems may violate fundamental human rights codified in
constitutions and binding international rules. This is in addition to
the violation of ethical commitments, for example when algorithms
cause “flash crashes” as a result of non-transparent “black-boxed” high-
frequency trading; or when minority communities are disproportionally
more policed than others due to the “vicious circle” effects of predictive
police software, or a false target recognition of military targets in the so-
called “signature strikes” based on the presumed resemblances of mobile
phone movement records of targets to the records of known terrorists.
The threats may be specific to a single domain of use of AI, such as
in insurance, banking, the judiciary, or law enforcement, but several
common threats exist in all domains. Examples of AI usage suggest that
the new presumably objective tools, often presented as “pure” math,
v
vi Preface
raise many legal and ethical challenges: at the micro level, AI used in
decision-making systems regarding individuals’ rights and obligations
may interfere with individual human rights, such as privacy and personal
data protection, the principle of equality and social justice, and the
individual’s autonomy and dignity. On the meso and macro levels, AI
influences the functioning of democracy, exacerbates global social and
economic inequalities, and increases the social sorting of the population.
The book’s initial premise is that AI inevitably enters a specific social,
cultural, and political space. It is the product of a particular socioeco-
nomic and cultural milieu that the tools in turn help reshape. Therefore,
AI can be used to enhance “negative” social changes, for example,
by increasing economic inequality at a global level, expanding socially
disruptive and hostile policies, or as a means to prevent such social
changes. This book’s overall objective is to critically explore to what
extent and how AI can infringe on human rights in various domains
and may lead to individual, social, and ecological harmful consequences.
Seeing that the European Union has outlined its efforts to use big data,
machine learning, and AI to tackle several inherently social problems,
such as poverty, climate change, social inequality, and criminality, this
book advocates that the developments in AI must take place in an appro-
priate ethical and legal framework. It also offers recommendations in
various fields of law, especially international human rights law, personal
data protection law, anti-discrimination law and even space law, and
indicates the direction for such a framework should take in order to
increase the existing levels of respect for human rights and fundamental
freedoms of individuals, consolidate legitimate democratic processes and
ensure economic and political stability.
The first part of the book addresses human rights violations and harms
that may occur in relation to AI tools in the criminal justice and law
enforcement domain, modern warfare, and horizontal private law rela-
tionships, such as in employment. It analyses the impacts AI has in these
selected domains on specific human rights. The book offers insights into
the effects on legal rights and also goes beyond legally defined rights
to support positive values such as increasing well-being and the socially
beneficial development and use of AI.
Preface vii
The second part of the book offers insights into the governance of AI,
spanning from ethics to international human rights law, together with
an analysis of the private business responsibilities de lege lata and critical
reflections on the collision of politics, academia, and the AI industry in
“surveillance capitalism”. Here, the contributions propose ways in which
AI development, implementation, and use can be governed by various
types and strands of ethics and law. One aspect of the ethical implications
of AI is also technological, which refers to an analysis of the “computabil-
ity” of different ethical frameworks, a commonly used analytical tool
in computer analysis. The book finally situates the development of AI
in a specific capitalist constellation of power that generates social harm
and offers a reflection of the embeddedness of AI in the social-economic
constellations of power.
The aspects of this book that make it distinctive are, firstly, the fact
that it covers a broad range of subjects related to AI and human rights
and ethics on one hand, and secondly, its solution-oriented contributions
to the discussion of the governance of AI, on the other. It does so by
diving into existing legal rules, such as regarding businesses’ responsibili-
ties under international human rights law; the existing general guidelines
and space law provisions governing the prevention of harm that can serve
as an example for governing the use of AI also on Earth, and the rules
on the processing of personal data in the computer vision domain.
The book outlines the direction of the development and use of AI
tools to avoid harm and human rights violations, which is particularly
important for raising awareness about the issue and educating future
generations, as well as for researchers and practitioners, such as computer
science engineers, who play a role in policy making and in developing AI
tools.
The book is of interest to academics, students, and practitioners in
law, criminology, sociology, anthropology, political science, computer
science, and emerging AI studies. It appeals to researchers and practi-
tioners analysing technology and its societal and legal ramifications and
the implications of AI for society, law, and ethics. These can be sociolo-
gists, scholars in STS studies, security studies scholars, criminologists,
and legal scholars. The book is also of interest to the general public
viii Preface
because it provides an easy-to-read analysis of the risks AI poses for indi-
viduals and their rights and points to measures necessary to prevent or
remedy harm that already exists in law, such as antidiscrimination law,
international human rights law, and personal data protection law. The
book aims at counter-balancing AI scholarly articles and books perme-
ated with techno-enthusiastic sentiments and adding to the more critical
voices about AI’s consequences for society, individuals, and the environ-
ment. The advantage of the book is that it offers new insights into how to
avoid potential human rights violations and social harm by using existing
laws and human rights regimes and not only resorting to self-regulatory
regimes which are difficult to enforce.1
Ljubljana, Slovenia Aleš Završnik
1 Part of the research leading to this book was funded by the Slovenian Research Agency,
research project “Human Rights and Regulation of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” (no. V5-
1930, 2019–2021), led by Professor Aleš Završnik. In case contributors of individual chapters
conducted their research in the context of other research projects, this fact is indicated in their
respective chapters or the acknowledgment to the Agency left out.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to all the authors who supported
the initial idea for the book. They were ready to write their chapters,
format and revise them after the reviews, and engage in the peer-
reviewing process for the other chapters. The writing of their chapters
and their reviews are most appreciated!
We are extremely grateful to the book reviewers, who made helpful
comments and encouraged our discussion on how to focus our book
more precisely. Much appreciation goes to editor Ms Josie Taylor and
Ms Abarna Antonyraj and their team at Palgrave Macmillan, Springer
Nature, for their patience and big support in the process.
We would like to express our gratitude to all attendees of the confer-
ence “Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights and Social Harm” held in
Ljubljana on 15 June 2021 and attendees of the Autumn School “Law
and Challenges of Digital (R)evolution” in October 2020 and 2021 for
their stimulating talks and discussions that impacted our line of thought
and development of arguments for our book. We would also like to
express our gratitude to our colleagues at the Institute of Criminology
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