Research led by Charles Darwin University (CDU) shows that the age of artificial intelligence (AI) has changed our interactions, but threatens human dignity on a global scale.
Dr. Maria Randazzo, a scholar at the CDU law school, found that the technology reconstructs the Western legal and ethical landscape at an unprecedented rate, but weakens democratic values and deepens systemic bias.
Dr. Randazzo said current regulations do not prioritize fundamental human rights and freedoms, such as privacy, non-discrimination, user autonomy, and intellectual property rights — primarily thanks to the unrealized nature of many algorithmic models.
Calling this lack of transparency the “black box issue,” Dr. Randazzo said that decisions made by deep learning or machine learning processes are impossible for humans to track, making it difficult for users to determine whether and why AI models violate their rights and dignity and seek justice if necessary.
“This is a very important issue and will only get worse without proper regulation,” Dr. Randazzo said.
“AI is not intelligent in the human sense at all. It's not cognitive behavior, it's an engineering victory.
“There is no reason for what it is doing – because humans understand it, there is no process that appears to be just pattern recognition that has been stripped of embodiment, memory, empathy, or wisdom.”
Today, the three dominant digital powers around the world – the US, China and the European Union each take a significantly different approach to AI, leaning against market-centric, state-centric and human-centric models, respectively.
Dr. Randazzo said that the EU's human-centered approach is a favourable path to protecting human dignity, but without a global commitment to this goal, even that approach is insufficient.
“If we don't fix the development of AI to what makes us human globally — the ability to choose and feel our people, to reason carefully, to agree with empathy and compassion — we risk creating a system that flattens humanity to downdata points and flattens humanity to downdata points,” she said.
“Humanity must not be treated as a means of ends.”
“Human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence: an overview of legal issues and regulatory regimes” Australian Journal of Human Rights.
This paper is the first in the trilogy that Dr. Randazzo produces on this topic.
