Silvia Uscov: “A more technologized world, but one that does not know and defend its own rights, is a doomed world.”

I have something to confess on the Orthodox Easter’s Good Friday.

I only remember two lessons from my Religion classes, and both have influenced my work.

One of them is related to an incident. It was around 98-99 at school when a new gadget in the shape of an egg appeared, featuring a game where you had to take care of a chick. A classmate got so attached to her virtual chick that she decided she couldn’t leave it unfed, even during Religion class. After being caught and explaining the situation to the teacher, the teacher began a lesson on the devilish nature of becoming enslaved to inanimate things, like the virtual chick. She talked to us about the love of people and real animals.

The second lesson was that the Church means the community of people, not the building with spires. If you stand by your peers and help them, then you are serving the Church and God.

Yesterday, I received the book “Human Rights, Robot Wrongs” written by Dr. Susie Alegre , a British lawyer specializing in human rights, which I finished by the evening, so captivating it was. And reading about lawyer or judge robots (robot justice), military robots (killer robots), sex robots, robots that could provide care for helpless people (care robots), dog robots, etc., reminded me of my classmate’s virtual chick. She was as enthusiastic about her virtual chick as we are now about AI.

I also remembered how much harm we can do to each other. From the horrors of Nazism to the horrors of the pandemic in just the last 100 years (all with the help of some scientists and the law), which is why people have continuously developed Human Rights as a countermeasure to the sins we keep committing.

Dr. Susie Alegre talks about “AI religion and sins”. In quotes, because it is not a religious book, but talks about those who believe themselves prophets of a better world – while their profit grows and the guarantee of our rights decreases. The sin of not being allowed to express ourselves freely in the world of standardized algorithms, the sin of isolating ourselves from one another and being more easily controllable in the absence of a real community of people, the sin of having our thoughts manipulated by the delivery of only certain targeted information while being flooded with irrelevant information, the sin of other people discovering our thoughts and judging them according to their own beliefs, etc.

The book is a call to humanity, and the author shows that these are dangers that do not represent a technical problem to be solved with technology, but a hazard generated by people who develop and use technology to dehumanize others, to transform them into a set of dispensable data (as if in the future one should not be physically killed, but just eliminated from society with a click – indeed, the right to life should also be guaranteed for virtual life?).

“Tech solutionism often uses a hammer to crack a nut and fails to identify the real issues. Just as a robot poo-picker would be more useful for human flourishing than a robot dog, (in the justice system) technology needs to be a tool, not a replacement for humans.” This is the essence of the book and my conviction regarding technology.

Photo: Silvia Uscov

Business & Tech Lawyer | Lecturer Cyber Smart Academy | Senior Fellow CSFI.us 🇷🇴🇪🇺🇺🇸 http://www.linkedin.com/in/silviauscov

The author discusses the fact that technology even affects the right not to be subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment, which is an absolute right and, consequently, one for which there are NO exceptions. A more technologized world, but one that does not know and defend its own rights, is a doomed world. One cannot exist without the other.

I end with a part of the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which justifies the reason for its adoption:

“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts that have outraged the conscience of mankind, and whereas the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential that human rights should be protected by the rule of law so that man shall not be compelled, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression”.