Overcoming the human, rights, and the state in human rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights appeared to define human rights even as their scope, practice, interpretation, and ideological foundation remained contested, assuming as given core concepts of the human, law, and the state. The given is now contested. That contestation is the focus of this chapter, which uses two contemporary projects to examine the emerging contestations: transforming the objectives of economic activity and exploiting generative artificial intelligence in the service of that transformation. The examination is framed within six broad emerging categories of inquiry: decentering the human from human rights in an era of sustainability and climate change, decentering rights in an age of accountability, compliance, and remediation, privatizing the public sphere, governmentalizing the private sphere, managing discretionary supervision in politics and markets through law, and substituting or supplementing supervision through data-based analytics, predictive and descriptive analytics, and generative non-human decision making machine for humans and human collectives.