My recently released debut thriller, The Book of Judges, is interwoven with eight stories of historical fiction, each constructed around human rights trials. These various human rights issues from numerous cultures over the past two thousand years are very much with us even today - issues like the right to die, discriminatory laws, the right to privacy, the right to due process, the right to protect our ideas, the diminished capacity defense. But what of future human rights issues? The rapidly evolving tech world presents many new challenges to our rights. Here's one you may not have considered.

The computer scientist and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has predicted that within the next twenty years technology will allow us to transfer a complete human consciousness to a computer server. He believes this can grant us immortality, since, when our body dies, our consciousness can simply be transferred to a clone or robot to continue our "existence."

One of the historical stories from my novel deals with Henry VIII's attempt to "look inside the mind" of his subjects. Ray Kurzweil's theory presents a scary opportunity for some future Henry VIII who leads our country. We have three million deaths each year in the US. One million are sudden and/or accidental. But two million happen with time to plan (and, in the future, to potentially upload the person's consciousness to a computer server). Since around half of those people support either one political party or the other, a future Henry VIII could use AI to search those servers to "look inside the mind" of all these people and delete the servers for the people who support the opposing party, thereby eliminating around one million opposition voters per year.

Human rights abuses never seem to go away. And new ones evolve as our society and technology evolve. The judges in my novel stood firm against the abuses of their times and cultures, seeking justice despite the laws and their personal limitations. They said "Not today!" Sometimes, that's all it takes to repel the tide.