Explore yet another policy brief developed by participants in the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Program “Digital Constitutionalism and the UN Global Digital Compact”. The policy brief is the product of the Digital Constitutionalism Network’s successful Teaching Partnership that spans across several universities and enables students to engage both digitally and in person with pressing rights issues in the digital context. This brief is the fourth of a six-part series of policy briefs from the program held at the University of Bremen in the spring of 2024.

Authored by Sofia Diaz Gutierrez, Manuel Baron Romero, Gabriel Duran Herrera, and Meem Arafat Manab, the policy brief “Human Rights in the World of AI: Gaps between Visions Offered by Private Sector Actors, Professionals, and Governments with the UN Global Digital Compact, and How to Build a Bridge across these Gaps” explores the history of policy aimed at digital bills of rights, putting the Global Digital Compact in context with an analysis of 32 bills of rights that dealt with artificial intelligence prior to it. The analysis leads to a division of the prior bills of rights into the following four groups of stakeholders: governments, professional organizations, businesses, and rights advocacy groups. The analysis further organizes them based on the organizational centralization of the entity adopting the bill and on fealty to the people. The authors note the stakeholders’ varying interests, which account for the gaps amongst them with policy visions for digital bills of rights. The examination reveals minimal inclusion of environmental concerns in the documents, a notable issue considering the environmental impact of AI and data centers. The brief offers five policy principles to address the gaps amongst the bills of rights analyzed, paying attention to the importance of developing policies that would be agreeable to all of the stakeholders involved.

You can find the six policy briefs here: https://www.globaldigitalcompact.org/outcomes.html 

Photos: Matej Meza/Universität Bremen