Wednesday, 12th February 2025 @ 12:30pm
Abstract: Public authorities are increasingly turning to algorithmic regulation, or the use of algorithmic systems to apply and enforce the law. Their adoption of algorithmic regulation tends to be motivated by the desire to improve public services and to better fulfil citizens’ rights, thus seemingly contributing to the rule of law. However, in practice, many use cases have demonstrated how reliance on algorithmic systems can undermine the law’s protective power and instead lead to rule by law. This risk is hence neither hypothetical, nor limited to authoritarian regimes. In Europe, the creation of the European Union's AI Act offered a beacon of hope to address this concern, yet EU legislators ultimately failed to take it into account in their regulation. In this talk, Nathalie Smuha therefore argues that there is a significant misalignment between the EU's digital agenda and its rule of law agenda, which urgently needs to be addressed to counter the threat of algorithmic rule by law.