Existential risk or tool for inclusive prosperity? AI’s future needs human rights

Headlines are currently dominated by record-breaking heatwaves, catastrophic flooding, massive wildfires, and other extreme weather patterns in many regions. Responding to the climate crisis requires unprecedented actions and new forms of...

We asked ChatGPT about its impact on human rights and business. Here’s what it told us

ChatGPT won’t be able to stop its own misuse. It’s up to companies to place human rights principles at the core of machine learning AI.
 

The attention that ChatGPT has received in recent days has prompted a great deal of discussion about the...

Making Facebook’s New Human Rights Policy Real

The world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook, recently unveiled its human rights policy. It is a step in the right direction. But declaring a policy is one thing; implementing it is quite another.

In a recent podcast with the Institute for...

The Best of 2019

Rights and Wrongs - A Job Description for Facebook’s Human Rights Policy Director

The social media giant Facebook knows it has a problem and thinks it has figured out a way that can lead to a solution in the longer term. It is hiring a Director for Human Rights Policy. This is only a single step in a long journey, but does show...

The Gig Economy Doesn’t Have to be an Exploitative Economy

On the 4^th February 2019 the UK Union GMB and international courier company Hermes announced a ground-breaking deal. Their collective-bargaining agreement – the first ever recognition deal of its type – has potentially enormous implications for gig...

Rights and Wrongs - Can Machines Override Human Judgment on Air Safety?

Over the years, air travel has become remarkably safe – in 1977, four out of one million flights met with accidents; today, the number of flights has grown exponentially, and the accident rate has fallen to 0.4 out of a million. Air travel is safer...

Reflections on the Pakistan Ruling Banning Network Shutdowns

In late February 2018, in a landmark judgment, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) ruled that shutting down telecom networks was illegal, rejecting the State’s rationale that security considerations made such shutdowns necessary.

Pakistan has a history...

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica - Where Lies Privacy?

It is the cardinal rule of the Internet that anything you say in cyberspace lives in perpetuity, and there is no such thing as complete privacy.

Users can use cryptographic tools to protect their communications, change their passwords repeatedly,...

Facebook’s Problem with Political Ads - Can Human Rights Due Diligence Help?

Last week, in response to growing public pressure, social media giant Facebook agreed to provide information to U.S. Congressional investigators on advertising purchased by Russian-linked accounts seeking to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential...

The Challenge of Criminalising Hate Speech

This commentary was originally published in the Myanmar Times. 

Since Myanmar’s landmark election in November 2015, the National League for Democracy government has publicly condemned the use of so-called hate speech on several occasions and...

Who You Gonna Call? Troll Busters?

Milo Yiannopoulos is the kind of man who becomes well-known only because of the Internet. An editor at the right-wing website, Breitbart, he has, often been suspended from Twitter, the online micro-blogging site, because of his abusive behaviour...