Fundamental Rights and AI Impact Assessment: a proposal for a new quantitative approach

The upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act requires that deployers of some high-risk Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems perform a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA). This work proposes an innovative approach that returns a numerical index (named FRAIIA Score) to rank the potential impact of AI systems on Fundamental Rights (FR) of individuals. In a nutshell, the developed assessment methodology consists in two stages: (1) an open-ended survey that collects the contextual information and the technical features, in order to properly identify potential threats for FR, and (2) a quantitative matrix that measures the potential impacts of the AI system on each right safeguarded by the European Charter of Fundamentals Rights with a traceable and robust procedure. In light of an increasingly pervasive use of AI systems and considering the specificity of such technologies, we believe that a structured and quantitative process for assessing the impact on FR of individuals is still lacking and could be of great relevance in discovering and remedying possible violations. Indeed, the proposed framework could allow to: (1) be accountable and transparent in assessing the risks of implementing AI systems that affect people; (2) gain insights to understand if any right is threatened or any group of people is more vulnerable; (3) put in place mitigation strategies before and after the deployment of AI systems.