Established companies and start-ups around the world are rushing to develop or adopt artificial intelligence solutions that will reliably anticipate our behaviour and uncover our unconscious needs and desires. From trivial problems, like which groceries to buy or movies to watch, to decisions about whether to hire a candidate or extend a loan, AI-powered computers are increasingly making forecasts and decisions that affect all our lives.
According to the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, AI “is one of the most transformative forces of our time, and is bound to alter the fabric of society”. Examples of the potential social benefits of AI technology are many. But the risks associated with algorithmic decision-making are also well known: AI programs reflect the biases of their developers — both in how they formulate the problem to be solved and how they select, use and prioritise the data that will be processed.
Furthermore, the capacity of AI technology to identify connections and patterns across disparate data sets that would be undiscoverable by a human poses a major challenge to our privacy and reputation rights.