We see the government has developed the app Aarogya Setu, which will help people to keep themselves safe from the novel corona virus. It will ask for your symptoms and will tell you whether you should be worried about the contraction from the virus. It will also tell you about your surroundings, whether you are in any proximity of an infected person. At first, it looks like a great idea. Imagine someone who is infected by the virus and traveling around in the city. He would end-up affecting a lot of people around himself unintentionally. Now with this app, we can trace the path he chose and the places he visited. It will make it easier for the authorities to locate his contacts and isolate them from the masses. And, hence, by this, help to restrict the virus from spreading. Even in the future, if something of this magnitude comes, we can intervene in the very first step by isolating the very first few cases by using this technology. Having said that, but in the long run, we have to be careful with the harmful effects of such technology.
As author Yuval Noah Harari discussed in his book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", we are heading towards Digital dictatorship. He explained this through some old regimes in our 'Homo sapiens' history. If we look in the twentieth century, we started with three options- Fascism, Communism, and Liberalism. As fascism finished with the demolishing of Nazi regimes in Germany, we left with the other two options. Communism also finished with the end of the Soviet Union in the 1980's. Now, if you look back in history, you would find that one of the biggest reasons for the failure of authoritarian regimes was the mishandling of the data. They had so much data about their citizens that they don't know what to do with that data. Because back then, it was complicated to handle such complexity. But now, in the twenty-first century where we have such tools in the form of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which can handle that type of complexity and produce the result in a few seconds. It becomes easy for the state to control the sentiments of the public towards their action. Because now they know precisely where to place their focus- just like the tracing in the Aarogya Setu app. They would come to know which movie you like, and moreover to that 'why you like it'. At what point in the film, you felt emotional or agitated. And what triggers your neurons at that point of time, to rush in your head. It looks like some scene from some fictional sci-fi movie. But the truth is that this can be achievable with today's technology.
It is in this context we have to imagine our way forward. With such technology definitely, we can create the system, which will overcome the suffering of our species. By making leap fold improvements in the healthcare sector. But also, at the same time, we have to be very mindful of the consequence.
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