The Unbearable Likeness of Being

How Artificial Intelligence Challenges the Social Ontology of International Human Rights Law

Abstract

This paper examines how the social ontology that underpins the international human rights framework is being challenged by the affordances of AI/ML systems. To set the stage, this paper adopts a socially situated understanding of human rights - acknowledging the socially embedded nature of individuals within societies. Drawing upon Gould's theory on the social ontology of human rights, the individual is not only socially embedded but it is this social situatedness that enables the exercise of positive agency (including moral and political agency). The role of human rights is then to preserve conditions that enable the exercise of such capacities. While the ubiquity of computational technologies such as AI systems may prima facie seem to embrace and operationalise sociality, the paper highlights three pressure points, arguing that they lead towards the structural atomisation of individuals in ways that are in tension with the normative aims of international human rights law. Data points that group, infer and construct individuals through their likeness, atomise individuals as means to an end through AI/ML systems. Further, the efficiency-driven framing of AI/ML reliant on computational tractability means that individuals risk instrumentalisation through optimisation. Finally, the AI/ML mediated shaping of epistemic and enabling conditions can lead to contextual atomisation - threatening the condition antecedent for socially situated exercise of moral agency and with it, human rights.