Cynthia Khoo (Tekhnos Law) has posted “Of Data and Dissent: Labour and Human Rights at the Crossroads of the Automation Agenda” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
With every advent of a new technological phase — whether social media, big data, machine learning algorithms, or generative artificial intelligence (AI) — one fundamental task among many falls to legal scholars and practitioners, adjudicators, and lawmakers to confront: determining what the new technology changes, what it does not, and where and how the differences matter (legally and otherwise). To that end, this talk will address issues such as how algorithmic discrimination differs from “analog” discrimination; how society and our laws should view human labour in a time when so much more of it seems instantly replicable by machines; and the connection between how automated decision-making works and proposed changes to liability frameworks when it comes to AI.
What will become clear through this discussion is one thing that has never changed: technology is about power. Questions of technology thus carry particular weight in contexts built around systemic power imbalances, whether as a matter of workplace relations or human rights law. Drawing on a panoply of work by lawyers, academics, researchers, and grassroots community experts in various interdisciplinary combinations of law, computer science, labour, human rights, science and technology studies, and algorithmic accountability scholarship, this keynote will challenge the audience to reconceptualize AI not as a “neutral tool” or coherent technical object, but as, to quote anthropologist and computer scientist Ali Alkhatib, “an ideological project to shift” power, and consider the consequences of ignoring what that means for our legal and human rights.