Over the last couple of years, a number of economists and politicians have been exploring the threat to professional and middle class jobs posed by algorithms and robots,, for instance, here at the Harvard Business Review and here at the Economist.

Interestingly Article 22.1 of the GDPR offers a freedom from automatic processing, stating that,

The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

Obviously this can be finessed via consent as are the working hours restrictions in the UK, but this is a big problem for the robot lawyers (& doctors). When I originally found this clause I thought it might be new but it is in fact part of the previous Directive (Article 15.1) and implemented in UK Law as Para 12 of the Data Protection Act 1998

Freedom from Robots

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