The Dignity of the "Post-Human"?

I finally was able to get hold of a definition of the term "post-human" that has intrigued me ever since my wife showed me some of her readings on "post-humanism" in her Gender Studies course. Here it is:

"Posthuman

"The idea that either (i) the human species is at an evolutionary dead-end, and must incorporate technologies in order to evolve to the 'next level'; or (ii) that we have long ceased to be human, because of our increasingly intimate relationship with nonhumans, such as technological artifacts. ..." (David Bell, Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway (2007: New York, Routledge), p. 24)

It is the second sense of the term that is developed in Donna Haraway's argument that we are cyborgs:

"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics."

Bold theoretical pronouncements indeed. We are not only cyborgs figuratively speaking, because the literalness of our intimate relationship to machines, including to computers and cellphones, cannot be denied.

Now, if we are post-human or cyborgs, how are we to make sense of human rights?

One approach is to conceive of human dignity in relation to our relationship/s with machines or technology.

First of all, there is an existing human rights norm that specifically deal with technology, viz., Art. 15(1)(b) of the ICESCR which speaks of the right of everyone "to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications". This is no doubt the legal anchor for the movement to eliminate the "digital divide" between those for whom the internet and digital technology are an ubiquitous presence and those who are simply cut off from such goods.

However, access to technology and bridging the digital divide surely do not exhaust all that is problematic about our relationship to technology. Even when technology is accessible, you can still have an oppressive (dehumanizing?) relationship to it. Two examples come to mind:

1 - work invading our private time because the boss can reach us through the cellphone, or because work can be e-mailed;

2 - call center agents working in the graveyard shift because the internet has integrated relatively cheap labor in a different time zone to the economies of post-industrial countries.

Come to think of it, this is again the "cog in the machine" scenario that Marx has already railed against (so the "post-human" is not so new after all). Except now, the machines are more mobile and more ubiquitous (that is, for those in the right side of the digital divide).

But perhaps we have asked the wrong question. Perhaps it is not a matter of asking how we are humanized or dehumanized by technology, which assumes that we can distinguish between human and machine. If we are post-human, then will human dignity still matter? Will we have to throw away human rights as so much humanist anachronism? By celebrating the arrival of the post-human, are we not in fact giving up on the ideal of the truly human, i.e., people actually being treated as human beings, i.e., with dignity?