Human Rights, Robot Wrongs (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

‘AI’ was Collins Dictionary’s word of the year in 2023, described as ‘the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs’.1 Of course, it’s not technically a word, it’s an initialism, and like everything to do with AI, its actual meaning is hotly contested. But in 2023, AI was, undoubtedly, ‘a thing’. Everyone was talking about it, whether because it would save us or destroy us, make us more productive or steal our jobs, make money or be a deeply frustrating blockage to actually talking to a bank. The UK government organised an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, echoing the country’s reputation in the field in its long history of expertise harking back to the codebreakers of World War II. Tech bros like Elon Musk and Sam Altman toured the world, received like heads of state. The EU, the US and the UN all tried to outdo each other with press releases on world firsts in the holy grail of AI governance, that would save humanity but allow us to harness innovation, if and when they ever made it into law. Meanwhile China introduced its own suite of laws to bring the new technology to heel.

If you saw or heard anything about AI in 2023, you probably either felt swept away by the excitement of a futuristic life of leisure and pleasure, or doused in dread at the impending AI apocalypse and the prospect of an election mired in disinformation and deepfakes somewhere near you sometime soon. The media coverage and politics around the subject left little space for middle ground. Everything was overwhelming, urgent and inevitable.

The buzz around AI was driven, in part, by the launch of a new wave of generative AI products that were suddenly made available to the general public to play with for free. Text generators like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney became everyday words for many people who had never thought much about AI. The ability to produce doggerel mimicking a favourite poet or schmaltzy sci-fi pictures featuring an idealised girlfriend at the click of a mouse in the comfort of your own home enchanted many people. But while these new tools may have made a splash and fuelled the AI hype of 2023, AI and related technologies have been creeping into our daily lives for decades in ways we might not even realise.

If you met your partner on a dating app, there’s a fair chance a form of AI had a hand in the matchmaking. You may have swiped right, but an algorithm decided who you would see and who would see you. If you met them in 2023, it’s entirely possible that their photo was doctored by AI and your first exchanges were written by an AI, stepping in as the heartless twenty-first-century equivalent of Cyrano de Bergerac. When you opted for ‘Netflix and chill’, AI will have chosen the mood music or the movie in the background while you and your date were distracted.

If you bought this book from Amazon, an AI might well have chosen it for you based on an analysis of who you are and what you, or someone like you, might like. If you didn’t get a job interview last time you sent in an application, an AI probably decided you weren’t a good fit; and if that loan was turned down, an AI may have deemed you too risky. If you tried to find out why those decisions were taken, an AI chatbot probably helped you give up and accept your fate.

AI and emerging technologies are already embedded in our societies. We may well be on the threshold of a huge change in how those technologies work and what they mean for humanity. But we are still at the point where we can decide what we find on the other side. To reap the benefits, we need to understand the risks.

The start of 2023 was, for me, like most creatives I know, a time of existential despair. As I stared into the AI abyss that threatened to swallow human creativity whole, I seethed at the nonsensical headlines about the threat of artificial general intelligence to humanity. The problem was not the future AI apocalypse described by the so-called ‘godfathers of AI’ and their doom-monger friends; it was the complete lack of awareness in the immediate and thoughtless adoption of AI over art and humanity.

I was already bothered by the push to replace lawyers and judges with algorithmic probability machines, not because of what that might mean for the future of my profession, but because it would turn justice into a mechanical roll of the dice. The assault on human creativity was something even more profound and gut-wrenchingly awful. Like many others around the world, I sank into a depression from which no AI therapist could have dragged me.

A combination of things contributed to my existential angst. There was the fear that the already threadbare scope for paid creative work would be completely wiped out, artists’ economic rights becoming no more than a ‘hallucination’ in an AI-generated historical novel. And the dawning realisation that so many people don’t understand or care about human creativity left me floored.

But creativity, like campaigning, is visceral, skilled and directed. Ultimately it was anger that finally dragged me out of my funk, and hope that let me focus on the fight-back. I wrote this book hoping that it might connect with real people and help change things in the real world for the future.

This is a book about the impact that AI and emerging technologies will, and do already, have on humanity if we allow them to. It won’t take you very far under the hood to show you the nuts and bolts of what makes AI work, but it will show you what can happen when it goes wrong, what we can do to prevent that, and how to put things right. It is a human slant on AI and emerging technologies, not a technical one, and it is rooted in the universal language of human rights.

You may be a technologist worrying about the unintended consequences of your life’s work; a creator staring into the existential abyss; a politician trying to respond to the never-ending news cycle on AI without looking stupid or launching World War 3; a lawyer crafting new legal arguments out of old legal threads; a student thinking about your future; or, perhaps most likely, an interested member of the public wondering what it all means for you. This book will help you navigate a world filled with clichéd images of robot hands and humanoid faces with computer-chip brains without losing sight of your own humanity. It is a book about human rights, so I will start with a definition of those. The robots will come after.

Human rights

Human rights emerged in their modern form partly from the revolutionary ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe and North America. These were perhaps best encapsulated in the French revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. They were part of a new drive for individual freedom, social justice and democracy that would overturn the unfairness in the status quo.

Most of the human rights laws we have today stem from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), an international document agreed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 after the atrocities of World War II. I have used the UDHR as a reference point throughout the book, not because it is particularly useful in a courtroom (it is a declaration, not a treaty, though parts of it have become customary law), but because it achieved almost complete support from countries all around the world. The UDHR is the blueprint for human rights as they have developed in laws over the past 75 years, and the rights it contains continue to be as relevant today as they were for those who negotiated and signed it in the 1940s. It is the essence of what we need to be human.

Global recognition of human rights as the basis for the full enjoyment of humanity everywhere emerged as a response to the horrors of war and the Holocaust that had ravaged the world in the twentieth century. The UDHR is over 75 years old, but it remains a benchmark. With negotiators coming from different cultural, philosophical, religious and ideological backgrounds from all around the globe, the final text reflects the compromise needed for every human being to see their fundamental rights and freedoms reflected in the declaration. A strictly secular document, it allows religions and spirituality to flourish in a society grounded in science, diversity and pluralism. And it reflects both the individual rights and freedoms emerging from the European enlightenment and revered by the American brand of capitalistic freedom, and the collective economic, social and cultural rights that were important to socialist and communist countries at the time. In an age when colonialism was still in full swing and women’s place was firmly in the home, it offered a peaceful and optimistic path to freedom for the whole human family.

The UDHR is a declaration on the rights that all human beings are born with. It is a holistic list touching many aspects of our humanity, including the rights covered in this book, such as the right to life, the right to dignity and the right to private and family life; the rights to a fair trial, to liberty and to equality; the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, freedom of expression and the moral and economic rights of creators; the right to benefit from scientific discoveries; the right to work in decent conditions, to unionise and to rest, to name a few. The enjoyment of those rights for everyone, throughout our lives, everywhere in the world, is still a work in progress, one we cannot afford to forget as our existence becomes increasingly intertwined with technology. It is a template for a humane world born out...