Marc Andreessen: Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on […]
covid-19
Robots welcome to take over, as pandemic accelerates automation
New York Times: Labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society […]
Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology
Good news, Apple and Google are partnering to implement system-level APIs for a privacy friendly contact tracing done via bluetooth (which, as we were discussing the other day, seems the most sensible approach): Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This […]
Surveilling encounters
Here’s Carol Yin detailing how her movements have been tracked across China since the lockdown came into place. Upon entering a train station, she has been having to share her location data of recent weeks. When booking a taxi, she needs to scan a QR code generated by WeChat or Alipay to “check-in”. The same […]
Google’s mobility reports
A view on how we’re moving these days, based on aggregated data from Google Maps.
Little to do with hoarding
We can stop blaming the shortages on the rest of us. It’s a supply chain problem: If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and […]
The robots are ready
Brookings Institution: As virus-related recession fears escalate, it is important to stress that while automation is likely to surge in general, not everyone is equally vulnerable. As our 2019 assessment of automation trends suggests, it is low-income workers, the young, and workers of color who will be vulnerable if this pandemic shoves the nation into […]
Expect regulatory barriers to automation to be lifted
Reuters: Fresh fruit and vegetables will become increasingly scarce in Europe, suppliers warn, as the coronavirus pandemic hampers the global movement of produce and of the people needed to gather crops. BBC: Due to ever growing travel restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus, we are now facing a shortfall of almost 80% […]
How will we know when we’re through this?
Larry Brillant, an epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox: The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we’re only seeing right […]
Normal is not an option
Arnold King: In the long run, I don’t expect normal either. Pre-crisis, our patterns of specialization and trade were optimized for efficiency at the expense of fragility. Expect supply chains in the future to have a lot more redundancy and to be less driven by cost minimization. The Chief Risk Officer’s approval will now be […]
The guy in this video is flicking through the obituary pages of the local newspaper. The first paper is from the 9th of February: one page and a bit. The second paper is from the 13th of march, yesterday: 10 pages.
I also would like to point out that Lombardy, the region most severely affected by this, has a 9.9/10 score in health on the OECD scale: across all OECD regions, the region is in the top 5% in health.
How much worse it could get, in charts
NY Times: The point of a model like this is not to try to predict the future but to help people understand why we may need to change our behaviors or restrict our movements, and also to give people a sense of the sort of effect these changes can have. […] None of us know […]
At the end: “I think one thing that people should remember is that nature is the biggest bio-terrorist. Nature wants to kill you.”
Bill Gates, back in 2015:
But in fact, we can build a really good response system. We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. We’ve got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they’re moving. We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. And we need preparedness.
The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained? Do they understand about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? So they are absolutely ready to go. So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic.
Apple to close all Apple Stores outside China
Tim Cook: The global spread of COVID-19 is affecting every one of us. At Apple, we are people first, and we do what we do with the belief that technology can change lives and the hope that it can be a valuable tool in a moment like this. Teachers are innovating to make remote lessons […]