This is the latest in a series of Mitchell Institute Speaker Events promoting dialogues on themes in peace, security and justice which engage with the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research interests of Institute Fellows and PhD students.

To book your place please RSVP to the Mitchell Institute at mitchell.institute@qub.ac.uk by noon on Thursday 13 February.

Speaker: Dr Birgit Schippers (Senior Lecturer, St Mary’s University College Belfast and Visiting Scholar, Mitchell Institute)

Series convenor: Dr Zaheer Kazmi

Rapid advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) are impacting in areas such as medical diagnosis and treatment, in manufacturing, traffic control systems, social care, education, and environmental protection.  What happens to human rights, though, when AI systems are deployed in policing, criminal justice, or warfare? How worrying are the challenges of AI to our fundamental human rights? 

Dr Schippers will address AI’s challenges to human rights and examine current responses to these challenges.  Her focus is to assess political-theoretical approaches that consider the complex intertwinement of human living with AI, and, drawing on relational, especially posthumanist, perspectives, to consider new ways of thinking about human rights.

Dr Birgit Schippers’ current research harnesses posthumanist approaches to examine the intersection of human rights, AI, and the figure of ‘the human’.  Her recent book is Critical Perspectives on Human Rights (RLI, 2019) and expects to publish The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking Ethics in International Relations later this year.