New Technologies for Human Rights Law and Practice

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 324-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Huneeus

The seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) comes at a time of more contestation than usual over the future of human rights. A sense of urgency animates debates over whether the institutions and ideas of human rights can, or should, survive current geopolitical changes. This symposium, by contrast, shifts the lens to a more slow-moving but equally profound challenge to human rights law: how technology and its impacts on our social and physical environments are reshaping the debate on what it means to be human. Can the UDHR be recast for a time in which new technologies are continually altering how humans interact, and the legal status of robots, rivers, and apes alike are at times argued in the language of rights?


Author(s):  
Dominika Iwan

New technologies, as autonomous vehicles are, disrupt the way people exist, and con-sequently with human rights. Research devoted to artificial intelligence and robotics moves freely and the destination, for the time being, is unknown. This is the reason why special attention should be paid to the ethics of these branches of computer science in order to prevent the creation of a crisis point, when human beings are no longer neces-sary.. The aim of this paper is to examine whether such development is a new challenge to human rights law and what happens when an autonomous vehicle drives an autono-mous human being. The paper also mentions the desirable level of human control over the machine so that human dignity, from which human rights originate, is preserved.


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