New Frontiers of Profit and Risk: The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Impact on Business and Human Rights

ABSTRACT

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterised by the fusion of physical, digital, and biological technologies, will have profound social and economic consequences. But what impact will it have on human rights? This article critically interrogates key writings and speeches about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which requires reading between the lines of technical, business, and policy-orientated materials that rarely address human rights explicitly. The findings are a mix of good and bad news. First, the traditional linkage between economic competition and violations of bodily integrity is weakening as new forms of profitability in tomorrow’s digital ecosystems require empowered and creative individuals. However, these celebratory visions of the profitable interpenetration of our bodies, hardware and virtual worlds has a dark side. The next-generation of human rights violations arising from transnational business activities will be increasingly subtle, diffuse, and sophisticated.

KEYWORDS:

• Fourth Industrial Revolution
• AI
• technology
• Industry 4.0
• human rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Professor Changrok Soh is currently professor of Korea University Graduate School of International Studies as well as the Director of Human Rights Center. He is also a member of the advisory committee of UN Human Rights Council (UN HRC) and the President of Human Asia (a Human Rights NGO). He has a special interest in the field of human rights and human security, especially in East Asia.

Daniel Connolly is currently a research professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Korea University. His research and teaching interests includethe history of international relations, science and technology studies, and critical security studies.

Notes

1 These texts were gathered using Grab My Books, a browser add-on for Firefox browser capable of batch downloading custom RSS feeds. The feeds were created from custom Google News searches using the following keywords: Fourth Industrial Revolution, 4IR, Industry 4.0, technology and human rights.

2 The second batch was downloaded using a custom recipe for Calibre, an open source e-book management programme which automates the collection of RSS feeds. The feeds were created from custom Google News searches using the following keywords: Fourth Industrial Revolution, 4IR, Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence and human rights, AI and human rights, technology and human rights.

3 For an example of this corporate norm creation in the case of cloud computing see Mosco (2014).

4 For example, see the definition of technology in Murphy (2009, pp. 7–9).

5 This builds on an earlier generation of optimism regarding the internet and human rights, see Metzl (1996) and Axworthy (2000).

6 The argument about the ‘accountability gap’ exposed in our contemporary human rights framework by autonomous weapons should be understood as an earlier iteration of this concern. Activists imagined a weaponized robot sitting in the court docket, on trial for human rights abuses, see Docherty (2015) and Sparrow (2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2925085).