Wendy Wong: We, the Data, and Human Rights

Wendy Wong is a professor of political science and principal’s research chair at the University of British Columbia where she researches and teaches about the governance of emerging technologies, human rights, and civil society/non-state actors.

In this interview, we talk with Wendy about her new book We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age which is described as “a rallying call for extending human rights beyond our physical selves—and why we need to reboot rights in our data-intensive world.” Given the explosion of generative AI and mass data capture that fuels generative AI models, Wendy’s argument for extending human rights to the digital age seems very timely. We talk with her about how human rights might be applied to the age of data, the datafication by big tech, individuals as stakeholders in the digital world, and our awe of the human contributions that enables generative AI.

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Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music