Our key takeaway: Artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool is making its presence felt beyond the traditional sectors of tech and finance. Increasingly, AI is being used across a wide number of businesses to accomplish untold different types of tasks and analysis. In many ways, this proliferation of emerging technology is a boon for human development and the environment—it can help promote better healthcare outcomes, improve agricultural outputs for greater food security, model climate impacts and beyond. However, the very innovation that drives AI also poses serious risks to human rights if the technology is not properly designed, deployed and monitored. Companies and investors should apply a human rights-based framework to their use of AI and other emerging tech, including: establishing a corporate-wide understanding that human rights are “a useful tool in the box rather than … a constraint on innovation”; building capacity and bringing human rights expertise into AI teams; setting AI-specific human rights policies and conducting human rights due diligence on its use; and ensuring that the use and outcomes of AI are transparent and remediable if people are harmed.
The Chatham House International Law Programme published AI Governance and Human Rights: Resetting the Relationship (January 2023), authored by Kate Jones: