Sushma Raman, Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, discusses her new book, The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (co-authored with Bill Schulz).

On this episode of Technology & Prose, Sushma Raman joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about the meaning and role of human rights in the Good Society (1:45), the tension between strengthening existing rights and recognising new rights (4:30), Big Data, surveillance and the right to privacy (5:54), intercultural perspectives on the right to privacy and human rights (11:35), human gene editing, DNA sequencing, the use of ‘shed DNA’ and rights in our DNA (14:20), the rights of synthetic embryos (SHEEFS)(21:25), sentience and the recognition of rights, animal and robot rights (23:30), the current state of human rights (25:48), the ‘right to transition’ and the pros/cons of recognizing new rights (28:40), grassroots activism, international human rights organizations and the locations of human rights power (31:17), technology and human rights at the Carr Center (33:30).

References

The Capabilities Approach https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/

Universal Declaration of Human Rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

Sheila Jassanoff and J. Benjamin Hurlbut, A Global Observatory for Gene Editing https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03270-w

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award https://rfkhumanrights.org/

Justice Matters podcast https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/podcasts

Recorded on March 18th 2021