THE AI, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

WHAT LIES BENEATH AI AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Resumo

Isaac Asimov was a visionary. His novels and essays anticipated a future with humans coexisting with robots, spacecrafts and where the conquer of other planets and galaxies was a fact. Today, in the XXI century, we are clearly behind that scenario. We don't even know if we will survive our own inventions and our low and dark instincts.
Nevertheless, we are taking steps towards an even faster moving world, where our capacity of understanding will be overwhelmed by what's around us. Infoxication is the word describing our current environment, too much information that we are not able to attend, process and digest. We are clearly handicapped as we don't and we won't have the capacity to cope with what is being thrown to us. The development of Cloud Computing in 2006 marked a before and after in the massive deployment of computing tools and further laid the foundations for the globalization of information. It has been a launching platform for multiple developments, it has forced the total
interconnection of individuals, creating the man 24/7. The growing demand for applications, utilities, and tools has led to the deployment of increasingly complex applications, interconnected with data repositories, with increasingly sophisticated algorithms that sometimes can even regenerate themselves and make decisions on their own. The different AI tools and designs in the past were hindered not by more or less effective algorithms, but by the lack of massive processing capacity. (After all, the brute force model remains one of the most effective, an infinite number of monkeys typing on typewriters could write Don Quixote). Although Cloud Computing stands out for its scalability, that does not necessarily mean performance. For that, the grid computing model is more appropriate, giving rise to what we call HPC (High-Performance Computing). We are still in the early stages. And, as such, the beginnings allow us to define where we are heading, what limitations we want to impose, who controls, who regulates, what can be done, who regulates the regulator, and how reliable the information we have is. In an era where men are glued to (and enslaved by) machines, how far will we let them make decisions? Who will take the responsibility and ownership? Which legal implications would it have? Are we assisting to a new scenario where humans will resign to machine decisions? How will this impact on human rights?