If properly implemented, technology advances may provide us with significant benefits. However, a new issues paper details how they can also interfere with our human rights.
The paper, released by the Australian Human Rights Commission, exposes the good and bad sides to technology. For example:
- artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used to treat previously terminal illness. Yet it can also entrench or exacerbate inequality when used as a tool of ‘predictive policing’.
- new 3-D printing technology could soon enable an amputated limb to be replaced quickly and cheaply, by a highly-effective ‘printed’ prosthesis. Yet the same technology also can be used to ‘print’ a gun.
- blood can be transported by drone to the scene of an accident in time to save a life. Yet drones can also fire weapons and breach individual privacy.