Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence: An Urgently Needed Agenda

The increasing presence of artificial intelligence creates enormous challenges for human rights. Among the short-term challenges are ways in which technology engages just about all rights on the UDHR, as exemplified through use of effectively discriminatory algorithms. Medium-term challenges include changes in the nature of work that could call into question many people’s status as participants in society. In the long-term humans may have to live with machines that are intellectually and possibly morally superior, even though this is highly speculative. Artificial intelligence also gives a new relevance to moral debates that used to strike many as arcane.