The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of how AI, big data and frontier technologies impact rights from the data protection perspective. The newly adopted definition of AI by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states that “an AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that (can) influence physical or virtual environments.

There are both instrumental and intrinsic reasons to value democracy. In short, democracy is valuable instrumentally because: 

(1) democracy can assist us in producing laws and policies that protect the rights and interests of citizens, 

(2) democracy more often than other systems produces the right laws and policies (there are epistemic benefits to democratic decision-making), and 

(3) democracy can improve the people in it through increased autonomy and knowledge (Christiano and Bajaj, 2022).