Race and Rights in the Digital Age

Abstract

In contributing to a symposium on the 70-year anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), this essay focuses in particular on the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for race equality. AI is being used to make decisions about individuals’ lives without humans in the loop. An automated system’s “inputs” are designed by human beings. Nonetheless, the “outputs” of AI are machine-generated. That machines can now make such decisions poses a challenge for human rights, which was developed to protect humans (as rights-holders) and to hold humans accountable, as opposed to nonhumans. Optimistic observers had speculated that technology could help usher in a post-racial future, given that automated decision making seemed to be free of human bias. Plus, technology offers the freedom to construct and perform online identities as well as build online communities. However, drawing on new research on how we see and do not see race, this essay argues that even as we move into a digital age of posthumanism and transhumanism, race endures as a construct. Using a critical race theory lens, the essay interrogates the role of machines in making decisions that have racial impacts and the challenges this poses the human rights framework.