Friday, 10 July 2020

The Corona Crisis Reveals the Struggle for Our Future

by Dirk Helbing

For a long time, experts have warned of the implications of a non-sustainable world, but few have understood the implications. Today’s economic system would enter a terminal phase, before a new kind of system would raise from the ashes. For sure, the digital revolution allowed the machinery of utility maximization to reach new heights. Today’s surveillance capitalism sells our digital doubles, in other words: detailed digital copies of our lives. It became increasingly clear that we would be next. People were already talking about the value of life, which, from a market point of view, could be pretty little – considering the fact of over-population and the coming wave of robotic automation. I have warned that some have worked on systems that would autonomously decide over lives and deaths of people, based on a citizen score reflecting what their “systemic value” was claimed to be.

Then came the Corona Virus. Even though the world had been warned in advance of the next great pandemic to come, COVID-19 hit the world surprisingly unprepared. Even though it started to spread in early December 2019, there was a shortage not only of respirators, but also of disinfectants and face masks as late as April 2020. And so, many people died an early death. Some doctors took triage decisions as in war times, and old or seriously ill people did not stand good chances to be helped. Some doctors relied on “terminal care”: basically, they gave opiates and sleeping pills to patients they could not save, and put them to death.

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