Compensation for damages?
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought humanity closer to the next stage of the technological revolution
HSE Blog on Naked Science
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the world has faced serious challenges that required the concentration of efforts of many people and the involvement of the latest technologies. This has led to a powerful technological breakthrough, especially in the field of medicine. HSE and MSU scientists have published an article in which they assessed the impact of Covid-19 on the development of society. The authors concluded that the pandemic will significantly accelerate the transition of humanity to a new stage of development, but at the same time can cause strong social tension.
However, the technological revolution always entails radical socio-political changes. The article by scientists Leonid Grinin, Anton Grinin and Andrey Korotaev discusses two main changes of this kind: the spread and development of sociotechnical self-regulating systems and the movement towards an electronic state.
The socio-political and economic role of medicine has increased dramatically in connection with the fight against coronavirus infection (although it also increased before the pandemic, since there is an aging trend in the population around the world). This has significantly changed the attitude of the state to medical services and their financing, including a significant redistribution of budgetary and private funds in favor of medicine, which led to active technological development in this sector.
The development of vaccines has given impetus to innovative breakthroughs in biotechnology and genetic engineering. The need for isolation and social distancing has provoked the introduction of online technologies, including in such areas as remote medical care or remote psychological assistance, biometrics, in particular contactless.
The fight against coronavirus has raised the issue of a shortage of medical personnel. Robots in medicine, in particular robotic surgery, can be useful in this situation. The safety of doctors can also be ensured through the development of robotics and remote medical technologies. The pandemic has given impetus to the development of a number of other technologies, in particular additive and nanotechnology.
At the same time, scientists emphasize that in recent decades the development of information technology and artificial intelligence has had a noticeable impact on social relations. This influence can be traced in many areas, in particular in the structure of employment, the death of some professions and the emergence of others. Opportunities for distance education, jobs and services, including healthcare, are also expanding rapidly. In addition, a lot has changed in the field of creating, distributing, transforming and analyzing information, as well as controlling its flows.
This new power structure on the Internet has serious implications for democracy. The researchers note that modern AI capabilities already entail a systemic danger to society and threaten human rights. There is a growing problem of invasion of people's privacy by artificial intelligence technologies. The authors of the article remind that the confidentiality of information is a value that helps to shape society and the individual identity of each of us.
"The accelerated advancement of the technological wave and the dynamic transformation of society can be very painful and will cause strong social and political tensions, protests and conflicts, and trust in governments may decline. It is necessary to develop new laws that would optimize socio-technological interference in people's lives, especially the invasion of their privacy. It is necessary to go through a difficult path of trial and error in order to move forward on the way to the harmonization of the technological process and social life," said Andrey Korotaev, a leading researcher at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.
The urgent need to monitor compliance with security measures during the pandemic has exacerbated the problem and at the same time has shown that further development in this direction will lead to qualitative changes. The fact is that new combined technological systems based on artificial intelligence collect, store and analyze information about billions of people. Such systems are aimed at administrative, legal, social and even political regulation of the behavior of individuals, social groups and society as a whole. There is a tendency to delegate more and more tasks to sociotechnical systems.
Currently, they are actively used, for example, for face recognition, traffic control, imposition of fines, electronic registration, issuance of documents, and so on. That is, in those areas that were previously the prerogative of the authorities. Thus, according to the concept of scientists, the type of management of the future is being formed — an electronic state. This will lead to the creation of a new communicative chain in the management of society, will change the contours of relations between the center and the periphery.
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