Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. Kinda.
Vint Cerf, writing for the Time’s about the internet and human rights:
The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.
I’m sure Cerf’s a bright guy (he created the internet!), but his essay is wanting for a point. “The internet probably shouldn’t be a human right, maybe could be a civil right, but above all—engineers matter.” (Was the post was sponsored by the IEEE?)
Engineers who become famous and write op-ed pieces about human rights are like young actresses who are asked about feminism during movie junkets: flattered to be asked a deep question but then often vague and pointless.
