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Steven Livingston and Sushma Raman. 2/21/2017. “Conference Report: Technology & Human Rights in the 21st Century.” Technology & Human Rights in the 21st Century. Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Technology and Human Rights Conference Report

Technology & Human Rights in the 21st Century:

 

On November 3 - 4, 2016, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School hosted a symposium that aimed to:

1. Strengthen collaboration among stakeholders working on issues at the intersection of human rights and technology and

2. Deepen our understanding of the nature of collaboration among different technical and scientific communities working in human rights.

The symposium brought together practitioners and academics from different industries, academic disciplines and professional practices. Discussion centered on three clusters of scientific and technical capacities and the communities of practice associated with each of them. These clusters are:

• Geospatial Technology: The use of commercial remote sensing satellites, geographical information systems (GIS), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and geographical positioning satellites (GPS) and receivers to track events on earth.
   
• Digital Networks: The use of digital platforms to link individuals in different locations working towards a common goal, such as monitoring digital evidence of human rights violations around the world. It often involves crowdsourcing the collection of data over digital networks or social computation – the analysis of data by volunteers using digital networks.
   
• Forensic Science: The collection, preservation, examination and analysis of evidence of abuses and crimes for documentation, reconstruction, and understanding for public and court use. Among the more prominent evidential material in this area includes digital and multimedia evidence as well as corporal and other biologic evidence.  When considering the use of digital technologies, we might say that forensic science involves the recoding of material objects into binary code. This domain includes massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies as well as document scanning and data management technologies.

In their landmark 1998 book, Activists Beyond Borders, Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret Keck wrote that “by overcoming the deliberate suppression of information that sustains many abuses of power, human rights groups bring pressure to bear on those who perpetuate abuses” (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, Kindle Locations 77-78).  The Carr Center’s symposium on technology and human rights explored the ways modern human rights organization use science and technology to overcome the deliberate suppression of information.

Speakers discussed the latest advances in each of the key technologies represented at the symposium and used today by human rights organizations.

Steven Livingston and Sushma Raman co-organized the event. Livingston is Senior Fellow at the Carr Center and Professor of Media and Public Affairs and Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University; Raman is the Executive Director of the Carr Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Full online version here.

 



Mathias Risse. 4/15/2018. Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence: An Urgently Needed Agenda? . Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2018002nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text. Abstract

Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence: An Urgently Needed Agenda? by Mathias Risse 

 

Artificial intelligence generates challenges for human rights. Inviolability of human life is the central idea behind human rights, an underlying implicit assumption being the hierarchical superiority of humankind to other forms of life meriting less protection. These basic assumptions are questioned through the anticipated arrival of entities that are not alive in familiar ways but nonetheless are sentient and intellectually and perhaps eventually morally superior to humans. To be sure, this scenario may never come to pass and in any event lies in a part of the future beyond current grasp. But it is urgent to get this matter on the agenda. Threats posed by technology to other areas of human rights are already with us. My goal here is to survey these challenges in a way that distinguishes short-, medium-term and long-term perspectives



Sushma Raman and Steven Livingston. 5/15/2018. Human Rights Documentation in Limited Access Areas: The Use of Technology in War Crimes and Human Rights Abuse Investigations.. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 003rd ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Human Rights Documentation in Limited Access Areas: The Use of Technology in War Crimes and Human Rights Abuse Investigations:

 

We offer a theoretical framework for understanding the role of technological capabilities (affordances) in documenting war crimes and human rights abuses in limited access areas.  We focus on three digital affordances: geospatial, digital network, and digital forensic science.  The paper argues that by leveraging digital affordances, human rights groups gain access to otherwise inaccessible areas, or to information that has been degraded in an effort to obfuscate culpability.  We also argue that the use of digital technology invites a reassessment of what we mean when we speak of a human rights organization.  Organizational morphology in digital space is hybrid in nature, with traditional organizations also taking on or joining more virtual or solely digital forms.



Carr Center Human Rights for Policy. 1/1/2019. “Conference Report: Human Rights, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence.” Human Rights, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence. See full text.Abstract

Human Rights, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for the Next 70 Years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 

In early December 2018, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society hosted an inaugural conference that aimed to respond to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ 70th Anniversary by reflecting on the past, present and future of human rights. The conference was organized by Carr Center Faculty Director Mathias Risse.



Mathias Risse. 2/12/2019. Human Rights, Artificial Intelligence and Heideggerian Technoskepticism: The Long (Worrisome?) View. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019002nd ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Mathias Risse's explores the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights in his latest discussion paper. 

My concern is with the impact of Artificial Intelligence on human rights. I first identify two presumptions about ethics-and-AI we should make only with appropriate qualifications. These presumptions are that (a) for the time being investigating the impact of AI, especially in the human-rights domain, is a matter of investigating impact of certain tools, and that (b) the crucial danger is that some such tools – the artificially intelligent ones – might eventually become like their creators and conceivably turn against them.  We turn to Heidegger’s influential philosophy of technology to argue these presumptions require qualifications of a sort that should inform our discussion of AI. Next I argue that one major challenge is how human rights will prevail in an era that quite possibly is shaped by an enormous increase in economic inequality. Currently the human-rights movement is rather unprepared to deal with the resulting challenges. What is needed is greater focus on social justice/distributive justice, both domestically and globally, to make sure societies do not fall apart. I also ague that, in the long run, we must be prepared to deal with more types of moral status than we currently do and that quite plausibly some machines will have some type of moral status, which may or may not fall short of the moral status of human beings (a point also emerging from the Heidegger discussion). Machines may have to be integrated into human social and political lives.



Salil Shetty. 12/16/2018. “Can Technology deliver freedoms for India’s poor? ”. See full text.Abstract

Talk given by Carr Center's Senior Fellow Salil Shetty at TechFest IIT Bombay.

"My talk today is addressed to concerned citizens who are not experts on the subject. Many of the issues I am touching on require a much more complex and nuanced treatment but this talk is deliberately taking a simpler narrative."

Read Salil Shetty's complete presentation here: https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/cchr/files/can_tech_salil_shetty_01.pdf



Desmond Patton. 4/21/2019. “How to Solve Homelessness With Artificial Intelligence.” Ozy. See full text.Abstract

New article on Ozy.com featuring Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Desmond Patton.

“This is a pioneering phase for social work and AI,” says Desmond Patton, a professor at Columbia University who uses natural language processing algorithms to analyze gang violence. “I don’t think it’s a space yet.”

Read the full article here



Mark Latonero. 3/25/2019. “Deepfakes are Solvable—but Don’t Forget That “shallowfakes” are Already Pervasive.” MIT Technology Review. See full text.Abstract

New article features Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Mark Latonero.


" Mark Latonero, human rights lead at Data & Society, a nonprofit institute dedicated to the applications of data, agreed that technology companies should be doing more to tackle such issues. While Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and others have employees focused on human rights, he said, there was so much more they should be doing before they deploy technologies—not after."



Mark Latonero. 5/17/2019. “Big Tech Firms are Racing to Track Climate Refugees.” MIT Technology Review. See full text.Abstract

The MIT Technology Review features new report by Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Mark Latonero.

"Simply layering technology on top of existing humanitarian problems tends to exacerbate the issues it intended to resolve. In a new report on the role of digital identity in refugee and migrant contexts, a team of researchers at the Data & Society Research Institute, led by Mark Latonero, detail the various ways these initiatives can reproduce and worsen existing bureaucratic biases."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613531/big-tech-firms-are-racing-to-track-climate-refugees/



Mark Latonero, Keith Hiatt, Antonella Napolitano, Giulia Clericetti, and Melanie Penagos. 4/2019. Digital Identity in the Migration & Refugee Context: Italy Case Study. Data & Society. Data & Society. See full text.Abstract

datasociety_digitalidentity.pdf

New Report by Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow Mark Latonero.

"Increasingly, governments, corporations, international organizations, and nongov-ernmental organizations (NGOs) are seeking to use digital technologies to track the identities of migrants and refugees. This surging interest in digital identity technologies would seem to meet a pressing need: the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) states that in today’s modern world, lacking proof of identity can limit a person’s access to services and socio-economic participation, including employment opportunities, housing, a mobile phone, and a bank account. But this report argues that the tech-nologies and processes involved in digital identity will not provide easy solutions in the migration and refugee context. Technologies that rely on identity data introduce a new sociotechnical layer that may exacerbate existing biases, discrimination, or power imbalances.How can we weigh the added value of digital identification systems against the potential risks and harms to migrant safety and fundamental human rights? This report provides international organizations, policymakers, civil society, technologists, and funders with a deeper background on what we currently know about digital identity and how migrant identity data is situated in the Italian context. "

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