Emerging Technologies and the Future of Trafficking in Persons: The New Architecture of Exploitation

Scholarship on technology-facilitated trafficking in persons has largely focused on established digital technologies, leaving comparatively little attention to emerging technologies whose capabilities and regulatory implications remain unsettled. This article examines five such technologies—artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, quantum computing, advanced surveillance systems, and bioinformatics and biotechnology—and analyses their dual-use implications for trafficking in persons. Drawing on routine activity theory and situational crime prevention, and informed by a critical criminological perspective on structural inequality, the article uses a conceptual and narrative review of relevant peer-reviewed scholarship, legal literature, law-enforcement threat assessments, and international institutional reports. The analysis demonstrates that emerging technologies are reshaping the opportunity structures surrounding trafficking in distinct but interconnected ways: expanding offender capabilities, altering victim vulnerability and target suitability, and strengthening or undermining forms of capable guardianship. Generative AI, malicious large language models, and surveillance technologies are already facilitating recruitment, deception, coercion, and evasion, while developments in autonomous systems and quantum computing present more prospective risks. At the same time, AI-enabled analysis, biometric and DNA-based identification, advanced surveillance, and other emerging applications may strengthen victim identification, investigation, and prevention. The article conceptualizes governance of these dual-use technologies as anticipatory situational prevention and advances a normative framework grounded in the precautionary principle, technological equity, and victim-centricity. It concludes that technological interventions cannot substitute for addressing the structural inequalities that create vulnerability to trafficking and cautions against forms of techno-solutionism that reproduce or deepen those inequalities.