Human rights law is related to, but distinct from, the pursuit of well-being. Incorporating a human-rights framework as an essential basis for A/IS creators means A/IS creators honor existing law as part of their well-being analysis and implementation.
## BackgroundInternational human rights law has been firmly established for decades in order to protect various guarantees and freedoms as enshrined in charters such as the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights. In 2018, the Toronto Declaration on machine learning standards was released, calling on both governments and technology companies to ensure that algorithms respect basic principles of equality and non-discrimination. The Toronto Declaration sets forth an obligation to prevent machine learning systems from discriminating, and in some cases violating, existing human rights law.Well-being initiatives are typically undertaken for the sake of public interest. However, any metric, including well-being metrics, can be misused to justify human rights violations. Encampment and mistreatment of refugees and ethnic cleansing undertaken to preserve a nation’s culture (an aspect of well-being) is one example. Imprisonment or assassination of journalists or researchers to ensure the stability of a government is another. The use of wellbeing metrics to justify human rights violations is an unconscionable perversion of the nature of any well-being metric. It should be noted that these same practices happen today in relation to GDP. For instance, in 2012, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), approximately 21 million people are victims of forced labor (slavery), representing 9% to 56% of GDP income for various countries. These clear human rights violations, from sex trafficking and use of children in armies, to indentured farming or manufacturing labor, can increase a country’s GDP while obviously harming human well-being.
## RecommendationsWell-being metrics are designed to measure the efficacy of efforts related to individual and societal flourishing. Well-being as a value complements justice, equality, and freedom. Well-designed application of well-being considerations by A/IS creators should not displace other issues of human rights or ethical methodologies, but rather complement them.A human rights framework should represent the floor, and not the ceiling, for the standards to which A/IS creators must adhere. Developers and users of well-being metrics should be aware these metrics will not always adequately address human rights.
## Further Resources
Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights,
International Labor Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work,
The regularly updated University of Minnesota Human Rights Library provides a wealth of material on human rights laws, its history, and the organizations engaged in promoting them.The Oxford Human Rights Hub reports on how and why technologies surrounding artificial intelligence raise human rights issues"p.76-77