Volume 57

Workplace AI and Human Flourishing

E. Gary Spitko

This Article explores the important but largely unexplored relationship between workplace artificial intelligence (AI) and human flourishing. More specifically, the Article examines the potential impact of workplace AI decision tools on such critical matters as workers’ human dignity, workplace and personal autonomy, and the opportunity for upward mobility. AI can analyze data far more quickly and efficiently than humans. Moreover, AI computer models are far superior to people in uncovering subtle correlations in large amounts of data and learning from those correlations. Thus, workplace AI decision tools teach themselves to choose the criteria for recruitment, hiring, compensation, promotion, and termination of workers and ground their employment decisions firmly in empirical data that humans fail even to perceive. At the same time, these AI tools may insult human dignity, threaten worker autonomy, and serve as an agent of social ossification. Continue reading

Imperfect Protection Against Perfect Enforcement: When Procedure is Not Enough

William S. Fallon

Government technology that exclusively detects illegal conduct is per se constitutional. Today, the Fourth Amendment provides no protection—zero—against government technology that identifies illegality without also revealing private, innocent behavior.

Meanwhile, alarmingly, government is rapidly developing—and deploying— technology that bypasses the need to examine private, innocent behavior in its detection of wrongdoing. Government can know there is contraband in your bedroom drawer without the need to rummage through that drawer, your home, or any of your private information and possessions. Government can know there is illegal content on your phone without the need to search through that phone or any of your private accounts and data. If enforcement technologies continue to develop apace, under existing law, government will be able to detect—and punish—every instance of illegal behavior, every time, without violating the Fourth Amendment. This imminent, staggering government power is called “perfect enforcement of law.” Continue reading