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Coronavirus pandemic is pointing to how technology will transform the future – and some of its drawbacks
- Big data and artificial intelligence have been deployed to help contain the virus and hunt for a vaccine. But concerns persist over the threat to privacy and tech’s promotion of misinformation
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The world faces a paradigm-shaking set of economic, political, environmental and social issues. They include rising populations, the environment and failing post-World War II metrics and economic models; what each of these factors share is that technology offers both solutions and challenges.
As we focus on Covid-19’s health and economic hurdles, the environment and social changes loom in the background. What can we expect from technology?
Big data allows governments to track people in unprecedented ways and provides raw information, which can be used to find commonalities, trends and genetic markers to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and help develop vaccines.
5G speeds up information sharing, facial recognition, contact tracing, distance learning, GPS and social media, for example, allowing artificial intelligence experts to create real-time models that drive more accurate and targeted decision-making.
It took around five months to decode the severe acute respiratory syndrome genome; Covid-19’s was decoded in a month. AI is already speeding the process of finding a vaccine by going through the various antiviral combinations and selecting high probabilities that can be pursued in the lab.
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