On January 24, 2024, Dr. Wendy Wong presented research around her new book, “We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age”. Dr. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia. She is an international relations scholar with expertise in global governance, human rights, civil society, and AI/Big Data. She is the author of We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age,published this fall by MIT Press. Wong is the author of two other award-winning books, dozens of academic articles and chapters, and contributes to outlets such as CBC, The Globe and Mail, and the Conversation. Previously, she was at the University of Toronto, where she was Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society.
She explained that human rights are one of the major innovations of the 20th century. Their emergence after World War II and global uptake promised a new world of universalized humanity in which human dignity would be protected, and individuals would have agency and flourish. The proliferation of digital data (i.e. datafication) and its intertwining with our lives, coupled with the growth of AI, signals a fundamental shift in the human experience. Data are “sticky.” Human rights remain our best hope for ensuring essential human values that have come to be accepted internationally, but we have to account for how sticky data affect our conceptions of values like autonomy, dignity, equality, and community.. This talk will explore some of the ways data stickiness affects our lives, and make a case for the urgency of a human right to data literacy.
You can watch the whole presentation below: