Human Rights Beyond the Human: Hermeneutics and Normativity in the Age of the Unknown

Abstract

In his 1988 collection of essays The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Jean-François Lyotard declared that humanism gives us lessons in multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways ‘[but] always as if at least man were a certain value [‘une valeur sûre’], which has no need to be interrogated. Which even has the authority to suspend, forbid interrogation, suspicion, the thinking which knows away at everything’. This paper stems from Lyotard’s statement, interrogating the extent to which complex learning machines, built on various models of artificial intelligence, have the potential to become disruptive technologies that put human rights under strain and challenge exiting normative settings.

Keywords: human rights and technology; AI and human rights; law and technology; human-robot interraction; Jean-François Lyotard