A Declaration, what for?
The idea is simple. Faced with the exponential development of digital technology, AI, and metatechnologies, it is no longer enough to want to protect, as we are currently trying to do, individual rights and freedoms, the bedrock of human rights.
Why?
Because faced with the expansion of these technologies, the issue is no longer just about the freedom of individuals or respect for their privacy, but about the type of existence induced by their widespread use: an existence made up of functional behaviors, parameterized by machines and brought into compliance with the requirements of the digital ecosystem.
Yet such an existence is in principle perfectly compatible with all the individual rights as we know them today.
If therefore we do not want a human existence subordinated to the functioning of machines and those who control them, we need a new ethical frame of reference, an additional tier to Human Rights. This is what the Declaration accomplishes.
If It Is the Mind That Is Threatened, It Is the Mind That Must Be Protected
Let us start from a blinding obviousness: the proliferation of legal texts – particularly in Europe but not only – on data protection or respect for privacy, the inflation of ethics committees, charters, or good practice guides has done nothing to curb the proliferating expansion of digital technology augmented by artificial intelligence (metatechnologies). Neither the vigilance of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) in the United States nor the GDPR in Europe have deflected the triumphal march of digital giants' strategies. On the contrary, it is these giants who, everywhere, impose their rules and define, in doing so, the contours of future humanity.
In reality, these current texts and institutions are not intended to slow down this expansion, which they actually encourage. They consider the expansion of metatechnologies as fundamentally desirable and beneficial, and do not in any way question the grip of the digital ecosystem itself, which they consider desirable. In other words, when these regulations protect individuals, they protect them as users of digital technology, and it would not occur to any of these texts to want to protect individuals from the long-term effects of digital technology itself. This is a great boon for digital giants.
Certainly, the tools they make available to us provide undeniable services. But at the same time, the ecosystem that is being built at high speed around us profoundly modifies our behaviors and our lives, making them massively dependent on machines. Lives made up of functional behaviors, parameterized by algorithms and serving the digital ecosystem. This is a type of existence whose only evolutionary horizon is technical optimization, as the widely praised example of smart cities already shows. Smart cities, ultra-connected cities, embody what our societies of tomorrow could be.
Yet such an existence is compatible with respect for the fundamental rights of individuals. Far from protecting us from it, these rights, precisely because they can be respected in a digital ecosystem, favor its advent. This is, moreover, the societal project that the European Union encourages day after day, text after text, in its vision of the future digital society.
Nothing in current law therefore protects against this type of existence. We are currently not equipped morally, legally, and politically to face this evolution that is reinforced day after day. If we let it happen, this way of life could well settle in by default, quietly. Algorithmized life could become the norm of existence.
Our conviction is that permanent dependence on digital devices profoundly affects our mind, that is to say our existence, our way of inhabiting the world, our behaviors and our relationship with others, with objects, with institutions, and with ourselves.
Today, the human mind is threatened by attempts at extraction, capture, and manipulation, but also of control and surveillance, which, aggregated, will end up colonizing it. Mental health problems, spreading like an epidemic, are only one of the most visible symptoms.
Now, if it is the mind that is threatened, it is the mind that must be defended.
This is why we affirm that it is urgent to add a tier to the Declaration of Human Rights, in order to take into consideration the human mind, in all the dimensions of its existence. To ensure its flourishing and its sovereignty in the digital ecosystem.
Such is the intention of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Human Mind.