‘AI could transform world but it has enormous risks’ – O’Flaherty

Just six months into his role as the Council of Europe’s new Commissioner for Human Rights, Michael O’Flaherty’s in-tray is piling up.

“The issues are enormous. The key is to prioritise, make choices. And so I’m focusing on Ukraine,” he told Euronews Next on the sidelines of Web Summit in Lisbon.

“If we let go, if we lose sight of the need to stand up for Ukraine in every aspect, then it’s an existential loss for Europe. It’s that serious,” O’Flaherty warned.

The rising tide of antisemitism, islamophobia, and hate speech, as well as two ongoing conflicts on the continent’s eastern fringes and nefarious uses of tech, are posing an unprecedented challenge to human rights in Europe.

Ukraine has been high on the agenda at the annual tech event ever since the Russian invasion began nearly three years ago, with the embattled country’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, making a keynote appearance in 2022 to lobby the tech sector to help end the violence.

At this year’s event, human rights abuses in Europe continued to take centre stage with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Putin critic and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, giving a keynote on the importance of online dissent in the face of growing authoritarianism.

O’Flaherty, too, was in Lisbon this week to make the case for technology to be a force for good, particularly when it comes to the booming use of artificial intelligence (AI).

AI has the ‘potential to transform our world’

“Tech carries the most enormous potential for human thriving. Look, it’s banal. It’s commonplace to talk about the cures for cancer, the COVID vaccines. But it’s true. AI has the potential to transform our world into a place that’s unimaginably better for human existence, for the environment, and for the entire ecosystem,” O’Flaherty said. 

“But there are risks and there are the most enormous risks. We’ve seen them already. We’ve seen discrimination in the application of AI. We’ve seen the ability it has to spread disinformation. We see the horrors of weaponry. We see the risks of using AI in the justice sector. The list goes on”. 

Elected to his current role by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in January this year, O’Flaherty has long been a vocal proponent of regulation to protect human rights.

“There are ways to manage those risks: guardrails. And the most obvious guardrail is honouring the human rights commitments that our states have entered into,” he told Euronews Next. 

“They are as relevant online as offline, in the tech sector as anywhere else. The trick is to get to the toolbox developed for the application of human rights in the tech context and determine the right balance of regulation”.

The EU AI Act, which came into force on August 1 this year, provides some safeguarding, but it is as yet untested when it comes to defending human rights, the commissioner explained.

“The EU AI Act is a really interesting and important precedent, but it’s way too early to call on it yet, to see what it looks like and how it operates in practice,” O’Flaherty said. 

“The Council of Europe has developed a framework convention on artificial intelligence; a totally different kind of instrument and designed to commit those states that sign up to it to guarantee putting human rights at the heart of the oversight of AI and then delivering the meaningful oversight,” he added.

Bridge between tech and human rights’ world

In contrast to the EU AI Act, the framework – which has so far been signed by European Union member states, the UK, and the United States – is the first-ever international legally binding treaty of its kind and is purposefully designed to fill in the legal gaps left by rapid technological advances rather than regulate the technology itself.

Given the challenges being presented by the digital era, however, the tech sector and those advocating for human rights need to find a better way of communicating with each other, O’Flaherty noted. 

“I’m at Web Summit, which is a tech event. It’s full of techies. It’s full of people who know the industry inside out. There’s an awful lot of goodwill here,” he said. 

“There’s a genuine desire and an energy to build a better world. And the problem is the pathway to the better world… One of the issues is the tech world and the human rights world need to find a common language. We need to learn to speak to each other,” he added. 

“One way that we will do a better job of communicating is by working with civil society. There are very smart people out there in NGOs and other parts of civil society who have built the bridge. And they need to be involved in these conversations if we’re to make a future which would bring benefit for us all together”.

This bridge between the technology world and civil society could be instrumental in helping to serve justice for the atrocities committed in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began.

“There has to be justice. We have to have criminal accountability for criminal acts,” O’Flaherty said. 

“I’ve been to Bucha myself. I’ve been told firsthand about the horrors of what happened there. But I’ve been in many other places where atrocities have been perpetrated around the world. And I’m so glad that I was able to be part of a process towards getting criminal justice for those acts,” he added.

“[Justice] contributes to that sense of never again. And it has this preventive role. So we have to have justice”.