A number of HRW colleagues and I spent the past few days in Perugia, Italy, attending the International Journalism Festival, the annual gathering where reporters and others discus their craft. It’s a look at what’s going on, reflections on what’s to come, and a four-day networking bonanza.
Much of the buzz at the festival this year has been about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it means for the future of journalism – and the world.
On the one hand, there is a promise of tedious, formulaic tasks being done by machines. Indeed, some financial news stories are already automatically generated.
On the other hand, many journalists naturally see a threat to their livelihoods if machines are writing their stories.
And everyone here in Perugia is asking some fundamental questions about AI’s broader impacts. Who’s deciding what we should read in the news? How does it frame the world we live in and the choices we make every day? And how we vote in elections?
Human rights folks also have concerns about the new technology that is fast intruding on more and more spheres of our lives.
For example, app-based ride-hailing and delivery services often include elements that can push gig workers to work longer and harder, sometimes for less money. If companies hide pay calculations behind secret algorithms, how can you be sure workers’ rights are protected?
The growing use of facial recognition with machine learning is another concern. When deployed in train stations, stadiums, and other public spaces, it’s capable of tracking the identities and movements of entire crowds. It’s an unprecedented form of mass surveillance, impacting our fundamental rights to freedom of assembly and association.
It can also be discriminatory. Research shows facial recognition algorithms are less likely to correctly identify the faces of people of color and women than those of white people and men, exposing the former groups to higher rates of misidentification and false accusations.
Finally, there’s the chilling threat on the near horizon of “killer robots” – fully autonomous weapon systems that would be able to select and engage targets in war zones (or even in policing) without any real human control.
We’ve discussed this digital dehumanization before in this newsletter, and the last few days in Perugia have done nothing to settle my mind. Maybe there are opportunities for businesses in these technologies, but the implications for humanity are deeply worrying.
