The second edition of Claudio Corradetti’s Relativism and Human Rights[1] updates his influential account of the theory and practice of human rights and further deepens what was already a major contribution to the philosophical literature in this field. In Chapter 3 of the book Corradetti offers a detailed discussion and reinterpretation of several attempts to ground human rights. This paper will offer a new layer to the discussion of how human rights are grounded. I will focus on the interplay between technology and the human rights agenda and, in particular, on the relationship between the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the project of grounding human rights. Corradetti and other key thinkers on rights have not paid much attention to the impact of AI on the traditional grounds of human rights, and I hope this paper encourages them to take a second look. Part I provides a brief overview of statistical machine learning (the main variant of what the popular media calls AI) and its current uses. Part II considers the implications of this type of technology on classical and contemporary justifications of human rights. Part III takes up the relationship between algorithmic governance and human rights. The conclusion places the discussion in the context of the broader interplay between technological developments, selfperceptions, and political institutions.
