Yuriy Lazebnikov: “Tinfoil Hat. How Technologies Protect Us From The Coronavirus”
As of February 27, about 82 thousand people have coronavirus, and the number of dead is about 2,7 thousand.
Yuriy Lazebnikov, the managing partner of TECHIIA holding, explained how technologies fight viruses.
“The Chinese authorities are introducing strict quarantine and punishment for concealing symptoms in the form of imprisonment and the death penalty. WHO is declaring a global emergency as the disease spreads to other countries where medicine is much lower than in China.
The Chinese authorities are introducing strict quarantine and punishment for concealing symptoms in the form of imprisonment and the death penalty. WHO is declaring a global emergency as the disease spreads to other countries where medicine is much lower than in China.
While the situation is developing rapidly, panic among people is growing even faster. Fear affects people’s behavior and decisions, which, in turn, changes events in the world. According to WHO, up to 650 thousand people die of influenza each year, and respiratory infections have been among the top 4 most common causes of death in the world since 2016.
But few people pay attention to this, because the news about the influenza epidemic is perceived as something ordinary and familiar, and new epidemics cause panic and even posts about biological weapons. The fact is that coronavirus should be perceived not only as an epidemic of a dangerous disease, for which there is no vaccine yet but as a cause of severe problems for the Chinese economy and the world.
China
As the vaccine has not yet been found, and according to the most positive forecasts it may take about six months, companies are freezing their operations all over the country. For comparison, the SARS virus, which broke out in 2003 and infected about 8 thousand people in 37 countries, cost the world economy $40 billion.
Although the new coronavirus is less deadly, due to its rapid spread and panic, it is also expected to cause more damage. Due to the epidemic, the Chinese stock market fell by 8%, and the price of oil fell to its lowest level in 13 months due to low consumption by the Chinese.
The same is true for the prices of industrial metals, cereals, and other raw materials. In just one day, February 3, Chinese companies lost $ 420 billion — the largest amount of losses in 12 years.
The world
In addition to global issues such as stock declines and resource devaluation, the epidemic has also affected several essential events. For example, because of the coronavirus, the status Tokyo marathon, a meeting of heads of international organizations controlling the work of air transport, a massive motorcycle show in Beijing, the premier of the new James Bond in China were canceled.
Also, one of the most painful strikes of the epidemic was the Mobile World Congress 2020, the largest annual technology exhibition to be held in Barcelona in late February.
More than 100 thousand participants and 28 thousand companies announced their participation. The organizers, GSMA, announced that this was the first such incident in 33 years. Despite the high-security measures announced in advance, many companies refused to participate.
Firstly, the cancellation of flights from China severely interferes with logistics, and secondly, this crowding in one place carries a serious risk of infection. The global technology giants Amazon, Facebook, Sony, LG, and many others refused to participate.
Technologies vs. epidemic
Have there been similar epidemics in the past? Of course, they have:
- HIV/AIDS (1981 to present) — 35 million victims;
- Swine influenza (2009) — 285 thousand to 580 thousand victims;
- Smallpox (3,000 B.C.-1982) — 300 million victims;
- Black Death (1347–1353) — 75–200 million victims;
- Spanish flu (1918–1919) 50–100 million victims;
- Bubonic plague or the Plague of Justinian (541–574) — 25–50 million victims.
Humanity is constantly fighting against epidemics, industrial disasters, or Earth phenomena that threaten to destroy us. Technology plays a key role in critical situations where humanity faces another threat. Epidemics can take millions of lives, but they provide technology companies with the opportunity for rapid development, and this is true not only for medicine.
For example, the Canadian company Bluedot, using its artificial intelligence technology, predicted in 2019 a possible epidemic in China and even the way of its further development. Big data analysis, transport tracking, and social network monitoring with the latest technology give a fairly clear picture of future events.
You can observe the epidemic in real-time or know the exact number and location of sick or dead people.
New approaches and tools help to reduce the devastating impact and loss of life after each incident, but there are pros and cons as well. Just 20 years ago, Internet penetration was not so massive and fast. There was no mobile Internet, no smartphones, no social networks, and no such incredible speed of data exchange.
Not only has this changed the way we deal with global disasters like virus epidemics, but it has also helped to spread rumors and panic around the situation quickly. That is, people can quickly warn of the danger, convey all the necessary information about the methods of protection, a plan of further action and all the news, and just as effectively scare with stories about the end of the world and biological weapons.
Big brother is watching
China is a control country, with thousands of face recognition cameras installed at every step. How serious is this? One camera for 6 people. Eight of the ten most controlled cities in the world are in China. Every move you make during the day will be digitized and analyzed. Face recognition technology is a particular stage in the development of any progressive country.
It is the way to find criminals who have almost lost their trail, lost children, drug dealers, and in general, anyone in whom the country is interested and who dares to appear somewhere in public. You may get suspicious if suddenly you grow a beard or start coming out of your own house not from the front door, but the back door. Through the development of this kind of control, the term “surveillance capitalism” emerged.
China relies on machine learning algorithms in its control and analysis system. The government has created a so-called integrated platform for joint operations, which uses powerful AI to control all checkpoints in cities and outside them.
Cameras can quickly identify people’s ethnicity by facial features and alert the police if a person belonging to a minority enters any of the government institutions: a bank, a hospital, or a shopping mall. It can also warn authorities that a group of people is quickly gathering elsewhere, which automatically makes them suspects and possible perpetrators of a terrorist act.
That’s not the end. Citizens should install two special applications on their smartphones to collect data and “clean up” the Internet. As recent terrorist attacks distinguished themselves by the use of knives and blades, butchers and restaurateurs engrave special QR codes on them with information about the owner’s identity, and the Beidou satellite surveillance system has been installed on all vehicles since 2017. A special program that is designed to check the health of the adult population collects biometric data of people: DNA, blood type, voice, and facial scans.
The influence of techno corporations
China does not have Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, but the development of information technology still helps prevent the authorities from hiding the epidemic. The most popular communication application in China is WeChat, and some people who talked about the coronavirus had their accounts blocked.
On the one hand, it’s a terrible thing to do. On the other hand, not only accounts that discussed real problems were blocked, but also those that spread fakes and raised general panic among people. Later, when it became clear that the blocking did not work, local social networks themselves began to publish a rebuttal of fakes and the vital truth about the epidemic.
The epidemic has made it possible for China to make its citizen tracking system even better without going to other countries. Local companies began to offer solutions that could effectively recognize people with fever through infrared cameras, detect the symptoms of coronavirus in masked people, measure the temperature to within tenths of a degree without contact, and predict the possibility of infection.
The control systems caused by the authoritarian regime can work for the benefit of society. The important thing is in whose hands the tools and capabilities are concentrated. In crises, when every minute is essential, and the lives of hundreds and thousands of people around the world are at stake, the selfishness of individual states or companies is overshadowed.
This perfectly demonstrates the situation when Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and other companies without problems transferred the most expensive — their cloud computing and artificial intelligence technologies — to scientists trying to solve the problem.
This is a case where the power of giant companies is used for the benefit of humanity, not for enrichment or maintaining competitiveness. It’s great that technology sharing around the world is becoming the norm, and to overcome problems, companies are willing to give their developments to scientists and doctors.
It so happens that epidemics, wars, and other cataclysms often push us to the development of technologies and new useful developments”.
