I had the pleasure to co-organize this Town Hall panel at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum.

Panel Theme and Goals

The regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has been intensively discussed throughout the last decade. Particularly, concerns about the threats that certain AI applications may introduce to people’s privacy, autonomy, and welfare have been raised and addressed by practitioners, civil society, and policy-makers. To a large extent, such concerns have shaped the new regulatory framework on AI proposed by the European Commission. However, despite incorporating sound ethical principles, many challenges are upfront regarding international law, applicability, and adoption among AI practitioners.

This panel discusses an overview of this new proposal for “Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence” and its potential opportunities and challenges under international law. In particular, this panel will focus on the implications of including deceptive/subliminal techniques and remote biometric identification systems as prohibited categories within the new EU proposal and the socio-technical ethical implications around it. Furthermore, this panel will assess the implications of this new legal framework on AI within the international (human rights) legal framework. The topic implies an initiative to study a barely new regulation that attempts to limit a new technology created by humans but performed by non-humans (robots). The proposal research questions are the following ones:

  1. What is the novel approach of the EU regulation about systems of artificial intelligence?
  2. What are the practical and socio-technical implications of including subliminal techniques and remote biometric identification systems as prohibited categories within the EU regulation proposal on AI?
  3. What are the main opportunities and challenges of these subliminal techniques and remote biometric identification systems within the rules of international law?
  4. What are the main opportunities and challenges to strengthen the human rights law and its protection of fundamental rights?
  5. What is the impact on human rights?
  6. How to ensure meaningful, timely, and transparent multi-stakeholder participation in assessing human rights impacts?

The AI systems represent the possibility of breaking the rules for creating and regulating human activity as we know. Therefore, any potential regulation on the matter, particularly when it contains provisions that may harm humans, must be an issue of analysis from a regional and international point of view.