CALL FOR PAPERS

THE CHALLENGES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR LAW IN EUROPE: VALUES, RIGHTS AND REGULATION IN THE EUROPEAN LEGAL SPACE

A conference organised jointly by the French Embassy and Institute in Hungary, and the Institute for Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest

9-10 June 2022, Centre for Social Sciences, Tóth Kálmán utca 4, Budapest 1097

Description:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology which is predicted to have a decisive, potentially disruptive impact on how we live our lives as individuals, how societies are organised and how economies will develop in Europe and elsewhere in the world. As a technology which is still under development, AI has been expected to generate significant socio-economic benefits. However, it has also been associated with substantive risks and potential harms for contemporary individual and collective values, for current social and political institutions, and for the present way of life in European countries and beyond. The predicted or already visible risks and harms of the technology have prompted calls for its regulation – including its regulation in law – with the purpose of subjecting AI as well as its impact to socio-political control.

In the European legal space, the control of AI through law and regulation has adopted a distinct ethical focus aiming to address – primarily and as a precondition of further detailed regulation – the ethical and the fundamental rights challenges of the technology. Within the European Union, human-centred, ethical AI has emerged as the central buzzword in policy-making and regulation, which however became burdened with multiple, sometimes conflicting objectives and priorities. While the concern of European policy for common human values and the protection of fundamental rights seems genuine, the regulation and the legal control of AI have become entangled with the particular objectives of EU and national industrial policy, security policy and geopolitics, and with the protection of European and national technology sovereignty in global technological and economic competition.

With concrete measures of legal regulation in the pipeline in Europe, it appears that the regulatory control of AI – or at least of current, AI-related technologies – is a settled matter in the European legal space. However, the aim of controlling the technology and its development at present – considering in particular the complexity of the objectives and priorities pursued simultaneously by European policy-making – requires a careful assessment, which necessitates in turn an equally careful legal examination of individual present and prospective regulatory measures. The opportunity to control the technology now – irrespective of the importance of the values and other interests protected – may undermine technological development and may thus frustrate achieving the benefits associated with the technology in the future. In contrast, a delayed, hesitant legal control may put values, rights and concrete interests in jeopardy without a possibility in the future to reverse or remedy the damages thus caused.

The conference aims to give a platform for a critical, contextually oriented analysis and discussion of present and prospective legal regulation of AI and its impact in Europe, and of the need for such regulation and for further regulation in general. We would like to focus on three issues in particular:

• the justifiability and the suitability of the developing EU regulatory landscape;

• the legal challenges of the use of Automated Decision-Making (ADM) solutions in the judicial process;

• data bias and data discrimination.

Application:

The organisers invite the submission of conference papers from PhD students, academics and experts working in the area covered by the call. Papers critically analysing the relevant regulatory and policy developments in the EU, in the Council of Europe, or in individual or multiple European states will be given preference.

Abstracts of maximum 500-words should be sent by April 15th 2022 to Márton Varju: varju.marton@tk.hu.

The organisers plan to publish the best conference papers in a special issue of a recognised international law journal.