Technology is Vital to Human Security

For over four decades, I have fought to pave the way for innovation and new technology. At the same time, my wife and I restrict our 11-year-old son’s TV watching, deny him a smartphone and bar him from playing video games. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Perhaps. As CEO of the Consumer Technology Association , our nation’s largest technology association, I represent more than 1000 tech companies and advocate for their right to innovate and offer consumers a range of technologies that capture their attention and change how they engage with the world around them. At the same time, I also have a job as a parent, raising my children to be confident, curious, resilient, ethical, and good decision-makers. Technology can support those goals, but used excessively (especially in the case of screen time) it can also impede them.

At the same time, I’m passionate about the power of technology to make our world a better place. Innovations in the tech sector are delivering breakthroughs in healthcare, food production and education, and are helping protect our environment and deliver cleaner air and water. Widely available tools such as FaceTime or email allow us to collaborate with experts anywhere in the world, while advanced data analysis or coding tools exponentially multiply the impact of a single individual. People are capable of accomplishing more than ever before. ?

Breakthroughs in medical and health care technology are making us healthier and longer lived. The result is measurable: a baby born today is likely to live well into his or her 70s, twice the average lifespan of a baby born in the early 1900s. These technologies, some of which weren’t even imaginable when I joined CTA, are delivering on the promise of innovation to solve some of the world’s biggest and most intractable challenges.

That’s why I was so thrilled to stand at United Nations headquarters last week to announce that access to technology is now one of the UN’s eight human securities! Technology will now stand with Economic, Environmental, Food, Health, Political, Personal and Community security on the list of rights that protect and enhance the human experience. In collaboration with the UN Trust Fund for Human Security and World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) , we’re celebrating the transformative impact of technology on our world.

We’re shining a spotlight on the technology that’s making our world a better place to live for literally billions of people, and the technology that’s bridging the gap as we work towards the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Technology is enabling us to do more with less and delivering creative solutions that transform our world. It’s no overstatement to say that technology is vital to the survival and flourishing of humankind, and we’re on the front lines advocating for the policies and practices that unlock innovation. Not just for our generation, but for our children and grandchildren. Thanks to incredible efforts by industry, we see many of those innovations come to life on the show floor at CES each year – and the human securities will be a major theme at CES 2024.

Certainly, we need government guardrails around the development and deployment of cutting-edge technology, encouraging the good and minimizing the bad. (That’s not a controversial opinion: in recent CTA research, three quarters of U.S. adults said government is extremely or very important to regulate the hottest areas in technology right now, artificial intelligence.) But this unprecedented recognition by the world’s global body of the importance and possibilities of technology to improve the human condition should be top of mind as we pursue national and global policies affecting and shaping innovation.

Humans are unique among species in our capacity to dream of the future. Thanks to incredible technology innovations, we can envision endless possibilities for better lives and – even better – make them possible.