Scholarship That Matters: Schaake’s How to Guide

Highlights from Marietje Schaake's speech at the Mila conference on 'Protecting Human Rights in the Age of AI'.

Offering concluding remarks at Mila - Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle's conference on "Protecting Human Rights in the Age of AI", Marietje Schaake said she hoped people would feel energized by her talk. She succeeded. Her talk definitely felt energizing. But energizing may be too modest a word to describe the effect it actually had—enlightening feels more accurate.

At the heart of her presentation was a question raised earlier in the conference: how can researchers move the needle and influence meaningful change in AI governance?

That's a question Schaake is unusually well-positioned to answer. A former Member of the European Parliament—once dubbed the "ultimate digital MEP"—she now works in academia as the international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and as a fellow at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). These experiences gave her insight into both the world of policymaking and the world of academia.

In her talk, she digested what she had learned since her early days in politics—a time when she hoped to protect human rights in the digital space by tackling the issue of spyware, and was stunned to be met by human rights activists sounding the alarm about free speech concerns—and offered a condensed list of tips for researchers who want to make a positive impact in the fields of AI and human rights.

Among the lists of tips she gave:

▶ FOCUS ON A POSITIVE AGENDA FOR CHANGE: Lawmakers are human beings. Constant criticism does not incentivize them to do the right thing. Criticize constructively, and when legislators do things that will have a positive impact, make sure it doesn’t go unnoticed.

▶ EMPOWER LEGISLATORS: Help them do the right thing. Meet with them and their staff. Explain what you think should be done. For example, instead of repeating that we don't need new laws because the ones we have are sufficient, do the hard work of helping them understand how existing laws already apply to new challenges.

▶ SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF POLICYMAKERS: 600-page reports are not read. If you want to make a difference, write short and effective policy briefs.

All in all, Schaake's talk was energizing and inspiring in that she clearly communicated that nothing is inevitable, and that we could use artificial intelligence and technology as an opportunity to stop the decline in human rights that has been going on for the last 15 years. She suggested that we could take action to make human rights relevant again. But she didn't stop there, she gave us the tools to do it.

And in that sense, her talk was enlightening and empowering.