Human Rights Impact Assessment and AI

Abstract

The recent turn in the debate on AI regulation from ethics to law, the wide application of AI and the new challenges it poses in a variety of fields of human activities are urging legislators to find a paradigm of reference to assess the impacts of AI and to guide its development. This cannot only be done at a general level, on the basis of guiding principles and provisions, but the paradigm must be embedded into the development and deployment of each application. To this end, this chapter suggests a model for human rights impact assessment (HRIA) as part of the broader HRESIA model. This is a response to the lack of a formal methodology to facilitate an ex-ante approach based on a human-oriented design of AI. The result is a tool that can be easily used by entities involved in AI development from the outset in the design of new AI solutions and can follow the product/service throughout its lifecycle, providing specific, measurable and comparable evidence on potential impacts, their probability, extension, and severity, and facilitating comparison between possible alternative options.