Slavery.AI

The artificial intelligence market is swarming. Supercharged start-ups, global tech giants, and increasingly algorithmic governments target diverse use cases with new and stunningly innovative AI applications coming online every day. Where people are the computational subjects of those algorithmic machinations, however, there is no law, present or effective, to protect them against great and propagating harms. Consequently, people become data production units, the commoditized of the Data Industrial Complex and unfree, unpaid inputs to AI production.

This Article shares a new and provocative vision. It theorizes that unregulated AI systems and uses are giving rise to an emergent form of modern slavery: Slavery.AI. The Article examines the three structural systems of power that were responsible for historical chattel slavery and are at work today in Slavery.AI. Against these interdigitating power structures, the evolution of two legal concepts have brought forth, respectively, people-as-data-as-property and, ultimately, as inputs to AI production, and modern slavery in all its hideous permutations.

At the confluence of these power systems and trends, Slavery.AI is emerging, as defined, theorized, and exemplified here. The Article crafts a crucible in which to test its theory of Slavery.AI against the universal characteristics of systems of slavery and demonstrates how those characteristics sounding in property and in the abuse of power through cooptations of the rule of law are firmly entrenched or on their way to being so. This illustrated proof of concept holds. It also reveals that there may be yet be opportunities for responsible leaders to save freedom and to emancipate people from Slavery.AI.