The bill or rights that we all adhere to here in America was written mostly by one man, James Madison, back in the 18th century. It secures the following rights which I ordered according to my assessment of their value:
- The right to safety from cruel and unusual punishment
- The right to free speech
- The right to practice any or no religion
- The right to a trial by a grand jury
- The right to free press
- The right to refuse searches and seizures except with a warrant issued for probable cause
- The right to peaceful assembly
- The right to refuse to shelter soldiers at one's home
- The right to petition the government
- The right to bear arms
While many of these rights are still being practically violated elsewhere in the world even now, almost every country at least pays lip service to upholding them in principle, especially since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been pushed down the throats of every nation by the United Nations back in the 20th century.
But what newly emerging rights do you imagine our children and grand children might be fighting to secure in this century?
Already in 2016, one previously-nonexistent right has become necessary for dignified life: the right to digital privacy. As the decades pass, what other rights do you think might present themselves to the forefront of human culture? It takes quite a bit of imagination to come up with a list, so of course I decided to give it a try.
Here is my attempt to list five 21st century rights. I hope one day my grandchildren might read this post and go "Wow, grandpa's list wasn't all too bad":
The right to programmatic integrity
Guards against clandestine tampering with the software running on one's devices by the government, hackers, or other parties
This right guarantees that the hundreds of devices helping you live your life to the fullest do in fact operate in the way you expect them to, as opposed to having them turn against you or operate to somebody else's benefit without your knowledge or consent. This is probably going to become especially important if implantable devices go mainstream. Imagine for example if a chip embedded in your body was being used to track your location, or if a smart thyroid regulator implant was being used to control your mood.
The right to unpredictability
Guards against predictive modeling of human behavioral patterns
This is already possible to a reasonable degree of success, and assuming continued advances in artificial intelligence for a few more decades, it might be possible to model a human being's behavioral patterns to the point where an algorithm with sufficient data might predict their next moves with high confidence. How would you like it if someone used a super computer to "figure you out" and unleashed that knowledge to his advantage or against yours, such that he could predict your every move almost perfectly, even before you thought of it? Worse still, in a scenario right out of a dystopian novel, the government might preemptively arrest or even convict people by virtue of having predicted their wrongdoing with high confidence using advanced algorithms.
The right to intact memory
Guards against memory erasure and falsification
Moving now to more far-fetched scenarios, this is going to become an issue if technology develops around manipulating memory engrams in human brains. Without this right, one might argue that spies or other enemies of the state might be subjected to erasure of all knowledge that is deemed as national security risk, or even falsification of memory in order to sabotage the enemy. Worse still, assignment into classified government projects could require memory erasure upon project conclusion as a matter of policy.
The right to genetic uniqueness
Guards against using someone's genome as a basis to produce clones
This in itself might not be such a common scenario. The more practical scenario would be using someone's genome as a stencil upon which to apply genetic engineering and produce more efficient humans. Imagine for example, taking an athlete's genetic map and enhancing it to mass-produce an army of fighters to deploy into a war zone. Or how about people stealing a hair follicle off your granddaughter and then using it to mass-clone her for human trafficking?
The right against temporal displacement
Guards against forced separation from normal flow of time
Perhaps the most far-fetched on this list, being forced out of temporal sync with your loved ones is a cruel fate indeed. If you can suffer through the boring part of the movie 'Interstellar', you'll find a fine example of that phenomenon towards the end of the movie. Imagine for example if a large space-mining corporation depletes the ore reserves at a nearby moon, and decides to move its operation to another solar system farther out. Your grandchild who's a space-miner there might suddenly be required to undergo stasis for four years per trip, and therefore find himself aging only one year per trip while his wife and children age five full years in the same duration. Even more far-fetched, imagine if technology develops such that travel near the speed of light is possible. In that case the aging differential might be much more dramatic. Your other grandchild (who is an army space pilot at the US department of space warfare) might be required to spend a week training on high speed space maneuvers, and come back to find his family's been waiting for him for a whole decade.
Do you think these 21st century rights are realistic? Can you think of any others?
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