Governance of AI or Governance by AI: Limits, New Threats, and Unnegotiable Principles

This chapter analyses the dynamics of AI governance and advances a few ideas that should help us ensure an AI compliant with human dignity and freedom, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Human beings are shedding their ability to govern and exercise regulatory authority over their own affairs, ceding power to nonhumans, but as much as this trend may be owed to the advance of AI technology, also complicit in it is the regulatory activity of the companies that develop these technologies. On top of that, there is the question of AI in the hands of governments, whose use of the technology for their own (legal) regulation gives them over citizens a power that can be misused or abused. How, then, to confront this danger that AI and its use are posing? This chapter argues that one tool we can use to protect ourselves is that of human rights, but to that end—if we are to make these rights effective—we must bring them up to date considering the advancements made in AI. Due to the very nature of AI, the focus is on privacy and data protection, where I identify three cases—namely, group privacy, biometric psychography, and neurorights—and with each of these cases I show that AI can be governed by introducing a suite of rights designed to be AI-responsive or otherwise by reinterpreting existing rights to make them so.