Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Remarks Cite Technology for Round-the-Clock Citizen Surveillance, Vaccines & Nanotechnology.
September 24, 2019 | Video | Transcript
“When I think of the great scientific revolutions of the past – print, the steam engine, aviation, the atomic age – I think of new tools that we acquired but over which we – the human race – had the advantage,
Which we controlled.
That is not necessarily the case in the digital age.
You may keep secrets from your friends, from your parents, your children, your doctor – even your personal trainer – but it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from Google.
And if that is true today, in future there may be nowhere to hide….”
“I am profoundly optimistic about the ability of new technology to serve as a liberator and remake the world wondrously and benignly,
indeed in countless respects technology is
already doing just that.
Today, nanotechnology – as I mentioned earlier – is revolutionising medicine by designing robots a fraction of the size of a red blood cell,
capable of swimming through our bodies, dispensing medicine and attacking malignant cells like some Star Wars armada….”
December 18, 2019 | Author: Andrea M. Matwyshyn, The Internet of Bodies, 61 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 77 (2019), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol61/iss1/3| William & Mary Law Review |
Link To Full_Document_The Internet of Bodies
Abstract
“This Article introduces the ongoing progression of the Internet of Things (IoT) into the Internet of Bodies (IoB)—a network of human bodies whose integrity and functionality rely at least in part on the Internet and related technologies, such as artificial intelligence. IoB devices will evidence the same categories of legacy security flaws that have plagued IoT devices. However, unlike most IoT, IoB technologies will directly, physically harm human bodies—a set of harms courts, legislators, and regulators will deem worthy of legal redress. As such, IoB will herald the arrival of (some forms of) corporate software liability and a new legal and policy battle over the integrity of the human body and mind. Framing this integrity battle in light of current regulatory approaches, this Article offers a set of specific innovation-sensitive proposals to bolster corporate conduct safeguards through regulatory agency action, contract, tort, intellectual property, and secured transactions and bankruptcy.
Yet, the challenges of IoB are not purely legal in nature. The social integration of IoB will also not be seamless. As bits and bodies meld and as human flesh becomes permanently entwined with hardware, software, and algorithms, IoB will test our norms and values as a society. In particular, it will challenge notions of human autonomy and self-governance. Legal scholars have traditionally considered Kantian autonomy as the paradigmatic lens for legal determinations impacting the human body. However, IoB threatens to undermine a fundamental precondition of Kantian autonomy—Kantian heautonomy. Damaged heautonomy renders both Kantian autonomy and deliberative democracy potentially compromised. As such, this Article argues that safeguarding heautonomy should constitute the animating legal principle for governance of IoB bodies. The Article concludes by introducing the companion essay to this Article, The Internet of Latour’s Things. This companion essay inspired by the work of Bruno Latour offers a sliding scale of “technohumanity” as a framework for the legal and policy discussion of what it means to be “human” in an age where bodies are the “things” connected to the Internet.”
Link To Full_Document_The Internet of Bodies