Description
This paper assesses the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Human Security and explores how the two fields intersect. In doing so the paper explores three key avenues of enquiry and articulates three core arguments. Drawing on the notion of human security as ‘Freedom from Fear’, the article begins with an analysis of how AI technologies cause and generate fear in people and political systems. I argue in this section of the paper that fear of AI technology has been a long term historical phenomenon generated both by its uses – including in the military and in surveillance operations - and by the way AI has been depicted. In this sense there has been a securitisation of AI accompanied by a discourse of fear that has created ontological anxiety in human populations across the globe. The fear generated by AI use and depiction has fed back into policy circles in ways that has led to the nationalisation and militarisation of policy in this space to the detriment of human security concerns. The second section of the article builds the second main argument, which relates to human security as ‘freedom from want’. In this section the paper problematises the use of AI in the economic, corporate and environmental sectors, and argues that AI technologies have caused significant economic displacement already, and that the disruption that AI will cause to our economies will create new forms of economic disenfranchisement, inequality and division that directly impact human security. This section builds on and seeks to draw connections between recent work on AI as an extractive technology and the growing literature on AI as part of the modern practice of data colonialism. The third section of the paper turns to the relationship between human security and the state. It is argued that AI poses significant challenges to state sovereignty, including challenging state authority and legitimacy. In this section it is argued that national governments will struggle to facilitate human security in an AI context, and that states desire to centralise and control AI power will create various deleterious effects for human security including and especially in authoritarian countries through the ongoing emergence of oppressive regimes of surveillance.
