Leadership
The Fourth Generation of Human Rights: Epistemic Rights in Digital Lifeworlds.” Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. See full text.Abstract
. 9/17/2021. “The world is rapidly changing, and with it, the human rights landscape continues to shift. As these changes continue, so does the work of the Carr Center to bring human rights front-and-center into our everyday lives. Our 2021-2022 annual report highlights the Carr Center’s growing reach over the past year, thanks to the continued expansion of our programs and the dedication of our faculty, fellows, and students to human rights policy and research.
Our new research, publications, books, podcast episodes, and webinars over the course of the year—created in tandem with our faculty and fellows—have reached over 150 countries around the world, bringing the Carr Center’s mission into the homes, universities, and workplaces of thousands. To learn more about what the Carr Center accomplished during the 2021-2022 academic year, click the link below.
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In contrast to China’s enormous efforts to upgrade its system of governance to a new technological level built around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead of adjusting democracy and human rights to the new technological possibilities, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism. It is vital for the sheer survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. The present project aims to contribute to that. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles, and characterize digital lifeworlds and what matters about them, in terms of both how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinction among various stages of human life and how they give rise to their own episteme and the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower (vocabulary inspired by Foucault). A set of epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights—as part of a fourth generation of rights—is needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles, which would be a long way towards performing this kind of upgrade. In the long run, as we progress into Life 3.0, we need a new kind of human right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence. The good news is that, to the extent that we can substantiate the meaning of human life in the uncaring world that natural science describes, we can substantiate such a right vis-à-vis nonhuman intelligent life. We must hope that arguments of this sort can persuade a superior intelligence—which is by definition, massively beyond ours, and hard to anticipate.