INTRODUCTION

’Fuck the algorithm.’ ‘I am not my postcode.’ London, August 2020. Thousands of placard waving students are marching in protest at their country's exam regulator, which used an algorithm to determine their final school year A level results. I was following the story closely, having just spent two years, at the University of Otago, working on a project examining the legal implications of artificial intelligence. New human rights issues were rapidly emerging in the fields of big data and machine learning. I saw similarities with my experiences of the Internet and human rights: technical communities of engineers, researchers and developers creating incredible tools, private sector investors, a civil society concerned about human rights interferences, and policymakers wondering how to respond. In this chapter, I briefly discuss some of these similarities, and consider their implications.

WHAT IS ‘ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE’?

‘Artificial intelligence’ (often known as AI) conjures up images of some kind of sentient machine or intelligent robot (‘the singularity’). While there are a few very convincing ‘puppets’, like Sophia, the first robot to be granted citizenship, this type of AI, known as general AI, is still a very long way off. According to David Kaye, who succeeded Frank La Rue as Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, ‘artificial intelligence’ is something of a misnomer, since it suggests ‘that machines can operate according to the same concepts and rules as human intelligence. They cannot’. The large gap between the scientific definitions and popular public perceptions of AI mean that there is ’no widely accepted definition of ‘artificial intelligence’.

For now, the focus is on the much narrower AI techniques. AI with very specific applications are being developed and deployed. The field of narrow AI is largely an extension of the statistical field of predictive analytics or mathematical predictive models, which has grown exponentially with the use of massive computing power to support its processes.