Standardising Equality in the Algorithmic Society? A Research Agenda

In 2024, the EU adopted the AI Act, a new set of rules for trustworthy artificial intelligence. This legal instrument carves a large place for standardisation, a regulatory technique that consists in crafting so-called harmonised technical standards, to facilitate legal compliance by industry stakeholders. While EU technical standards have been used in the past for ensuring product safety, for the first time the AI Act relies on standardisation to facilitate compliance with fundamental rights, including the right to non-discrimination and equality. The attempt to translate inherently open-textured rights and ethical principles into operationalizable standards raises critical questions. In particular, how will standardisation practices under the new EU AI Act affect, transform, contest and stabilise notions of equality and non-discrimination in an increasingly algorithmic society? This paper proposes a research agenda to address this question and unpack the black box of AI standardisation.