Deployment Age #5: Panopticon
Privacy & Biomedical Surveillance, Ethics in Technology, Opportunities
Hi there,
I hope you and your family are healthy and well.
This week cabin fever struck. And so I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the steps required to lift the lockdown.
Privacy & Biomedical Surveillance.
In After the Outbreak, I suggested that we are facing a necessary ramp-up of biomedical tracking in our everyday lives.
Temperature scanners everywhere and proof-of-immunity for entry: likely for flights, workplaces, nightclubs, hospitals.
As, Tomas Pueyo points out in the “Hammer and the Dance”, lockdown is about getting R0 below 1. Then we enter a game of slowly relaxing lockdown while trying to keep R0 below 1. To make sure that we don’t overshoot that R0 = 1 criteria and undo the hard-won gains of pausing life and the economy, we need extensive monitoring of the population.
Specifically, to move beyond general lockdown we will need a way to know at all times who has the virus and who’s been in contact with the infected. This needs to be coupled with a fast, strict means of removing infected individuals from circulation. Including at times, preventing them from interacting with their families and housemates. Inaccuracies in testing, and the high health and economic risks of getting this wrong mean that we will need to err on the side of caution.
In other words, governments will need:
a system for knowing who has the virus (very early after infection) or who might have the virus.
a system for figuring out where infected individuals have been and who they’ve had contact with - directly or indirectly.
a system for strictly imposing quarantine on those suspected individuals.
a system for preventing anyone who’s even suspected of being at-risk from entering certain high-risk environments - hospitals, flights, schools, universities. And when they re-open - nightclubs, concerts, football stadiums.
a system for shutting down entire neighbourhoods, cities or provinces and restricting movements of large populations at a moment’s notice.
This is the approach being taken in Taiwan and S. Korea. It is effective.
Jaron Lanier outlines how the Taiwanese approach was fast, precise, and democratic.
Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, “hacktivism” (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country’s success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus …Privacy was carefully protected, and the movements of an individual were not visible to others.
This pervasive, in-population biomedical monitoring is something we have not experienced in the West. It is incompatible with existing European views of Privacy.
The coronavirus pandemic has turned the Big Data equation on its head. There is now an incredible amount of public value in collecting, analyzing, and distributing data. We’re in a sensing and instrumentation race. COVID-19 infection and antibody tests are the most obvious strategic sensors but there’s an arsenal of lesser instruments needed. Instruments that will allow us to see through the fog of the current epidemic and direct precise responses that can deliver us safely to the new normal.
Ethics in Technology
Assessing the risk of a technology is an imprecise art. At its most basic, the study of ethics in technology aims to figure out if a new technology is inherently harmful, or whether it could be harmful. And in both cases, how harmful is it likely to be.
We can split potentially harmful technologies into three neat areas:
Technologies that are designed to do harm.
Technologies that do harm if used by bad people.
Technologies that do harm if used poorly, or if mistakes are made.
The pervasive biomedical monitoring we need for COVID-19 clearly falls into groups 2 and 3.
The risk equation of assessing a technology takes on new dimensions in a crisis. In our case, we need to implement this fast and at scale. And when it’s in place, we can foster the growth of new industries that mitigate the risks of this monitoring.
Specifically, expect a major investment in differential privacy, federated ID and dare I say it … a good use for Blockchain.
Opportunities.
Expanding on last week’s comment about the need for entrepreneurship in the coming Regeneration, here’s a brief list of startups that were founded at the beginning of the last recession: WhatsApp (2009), Venmo (2009), Instagram (2010), Uber (2009), Pinterest (2010), Slack (2009), Square (2009).
The big winners in that cohort were in digital payments, the sharing economy and social media. I have a feeling the big winners to emerge from this recession/depression will be in very different categories.
“You can not overtake 15 cars in sunny weather... but you can when it’s raining”
- Ayrton Senna
Now is not the time for opportunism. But soon we’ll be called on to rebuild.
And for that, it is worth preparing ourselves.
Photo by Masao Yamamoto. Sarah Crowe’s piece about the Zen and its relationship to Yamamoto’s work is worth the read, here.
As always, I’d be truly grateful for any feedback on this newsletter and would genuinely like to hear how you’re doing.
Stay safe, stay sane,
Simon