Technology & Rights

Technology And Human Rights

By Roy D. Follendore III

December 2, 2002

The moment some ancient man selected a stone and hit another fellow on top of the head with it, mankind has had to struggle with the relationship of technology and human rights. That fellow with the the stone was more powerful. When he had the stone, everyone understood he was boss. Soon everyone had acquired access to similar stones so that the original guy with the stone was no more powerful than his followers. One day another fellow decided to tie a stone on the end of a stick. This not only gave his stone a longer reach, the leverage made his stone hit much faster and harder than on held in the hand. The fellow with the stone on the stick was soon in charge. Life went on and the technology became more powerful.

This short story illustrates that technology has always been a factor in human rights. It also illustrates the fact that technology has been the foundation from which human leadership has developed. Governments may have been a natural facet arising from the arms race of human technology. Tribes rose and fell, kingdoms rose and fell, but the power of evolving technologies continued onward and with it the evolution of the way in which the tribal members are treated.

Today the nations of man exists as tokens to our technologies. We Americans choose our leaders through technology even as we fight over technology that generates the ballots. It appears to many rational men and women as though mankind has been trapped but we are only now able to recognize the trap for what it is. It is infeasible to step aside and allow technology to become all that we are. It is just as infeasible to eliminate technology in an attempt to return to some distant time and place. There is no other time and place. We are here in this time and place with what we have brought from our ancestors. These tools which we call technology solve problems which are otherwise unsolvable. Our reliance on technology is therefore unsolvable because it is a part of who and what we are as a culture. Our solution is therefore to move forward, to ask the questions that we must ask to move from what we are to what we shall be.

The power that technology has over society is engrained within the modern society in which we exist. The decisions that arise from the physical elements of the digital circuitry we use are embedded within the solutions as well as the questions that technology allows us to describe. Technology changes the questions we choose to ask as much as it changes the answers that are possible for us to give. These are the indirect attributes to technology that are ignored because they are not considered by most people as being significant. The society that is not aware of these great issues is not aware of the conditions and constraints in which it exists. The inevitable unexplainable gaps that arise as a result of this blindness must somehow otherwise be explained. If not, then the universe can not make sense.

The past twenty thousand years of technology has largely been associated with innovation. Cultures that were able to adapt to better ways of solving day to day problems were also able to enforce their societal values on others. The economics of change has always favored technological advancement because technology changes the way in which men are able to be organized. From the macro perspective, technology is more efficient because of this. This view is vastly different from the individual perspective. The individual always represents a serial process. Groups of people doing work may represent arrangements of serial or parallel processes. Technology increased both the serial and parallel organizational operations. Technology is what has allowed efficient specialization.

The technology that best epitomizes this idea is the factory. The first factories were simply cottage industry operations. The technology that was employed at that time created parts which were unique and therefore not interchangeable. Everything built was custom built. This meant that sometimes the quality was high, while at other times the quality was low. The manufactured parts only became interchangeable when the average employee became interchangeable. Both technology and society crossed a threshold at the moment when that occurred. When individual parts lost their unique features, the economic motivation for technological production increased. Advanced technology became available and viable for the average member of society.

The solutions that technology brought with it further shaped society. A proliferation of jobs were founded on technology. The purpose of work became technology. We wired the world the instant when technology became information. The human language was transformed to accommodate this goal. The human race rebuilt their cities to reflect the new technological aristocracy. The leadership of organizations based on technology became the most powerful political forces. Goals of society have become synonymous with the goals of the technological leadership and we have continued to be shaped by technology.

There is a legacy that has not kept up with technology. Mankind has isolated that which is what we have become from that which we expect ourselves to be. We use technology to do things that are incompatible with those things we wish to be. We want to use technology to make us more human yet we use technology as the original power tool to control others rather than to communicate with others. Technology is the tool of influence and coercion. It permeates the political existence of man and it permeates the military existence of man. The primary weapons systems that within our lifetime were designed to wipe out cities are now designed to eliminate an isolated selected target. The systems that were once designed to influence nations have been replaced by systems that influence individuals. The granularity of technology is now such that it reaches into the personal everyday decisions of individuals. Technology has invasively encroached on the personal privacy in ways that go past the concepts of home and identity. Who we are is technologically driven. What we are is now being technologically driven. Privacy is no longer expected by many people. Human DNA has become commercial technology and we are technological products.

Where we are is not where we began. The kinds of control that dominate society today are being concentrated by those who hold the latest rock. The world of the artist and the poet have been transformed into the controllable values of celebrity. The concept of God is not the same God of our ancestors, for it too has been similarly transformed. The meanings of things have changed, though the definitions of the words have remained the same. The idea of freedom has somehow been lost. Yet we are willing to give up our rights to maintain something we call freedom. What are the rights of technological product? What are the human rights of what has essentially become interchangeable components? Perhaps we have already given up our rights so that we are actually giving up nothing of value.

Where are those protestors of my generation who choose to think about what mankind is becoming? Where are those who are willing to speak up and challenge the status quo in the name of freedom and peace? Have human rights become absorbed by technology?

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