Yuval Noah Harari, one of the most influential contemporary thinkers, says in a recent article that the coronavirus pandemic will pass, but that the choices we make now could change our lives.
In a recent article in the Financial Times, Yuval Noah Harari, historian, writer and influential thinker, reflects on the impact that the decisions being made now may have on our future. He talks about humanistic innovation.
The general idea is that, in situations of enormous crises such as the one we are experiencing, decision-making is shortened by several orders of magnitude – what used to take years, is now decided in days or even hours. This acceleration should not lose sight of the future consequences of the decisions. For Harari, we are facing two dilemmas of enormous importance in which the best path must be decided: The first, to decide between citizen surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is to decidebetween the isolation of countries and global solidarity.
Regarding the first dilemma, Harari ventures that the use of technologies for monitoring and controlling citizens could be very useful, but at the same time they entail a great danger against individual freedoms. The equation, according to the thinker, would be resolved if citizens choose to trust scientific data and health care experts in the face of unfounded conspiracy theories and self-serving politicians. If this were done, surveillance technologies would be useful, used only as long as they were needed and only with the necessary data, and bidirectional: governments can track citizens and citizens of government. “If we don’t make the right choice, we could find ourselves giving up our most cherished freedoms, thinking this is the only way to safeguard our health.”
Regarding the second dilemma, Harari asks: “Will we walk the path of disunity, or will we adopt the path of global solidarity? If we choose disunity, it will not only prolong the crisis, but will likely lead to even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and crises that could assault humanity in the 21st century.”
In short, Harari’s article points out that the best decisions will be those that are centered on the human being, both towards citizens as individuals and towards the values that represent our society. Harari says in his article that in the same way that during a war countries nationalize key industries, the human war against the coronavirus requires that we “humanize” crucial production lines, the use of specialist human resources, and economic measures against the financial crisis that the pandemic brings, all on a global scale.
From the Bankinter Innovation Foundation, we share the reading of this article from the point of view of innovation:
1. Regarding the first dilemma of deciding between citizen surveillance and citizen empowerment:
- What innovative technologies are capable of empowering citizens, ensuring their right to privacy and at the same time serving to monitor the pandemic?
- Are there innovative technologies and procedures that prevent citizens from having to choose between the false dilemma of “your rights or your health”?
2. Regarding the second dilemma, of deciding between the isolation of countries and global solidarity:
- What mechanisms could be put in place to bring about a spirit of global cooperation and trust?
- How to encourage collaboration in the face of competition?
- How to share real-time data generated from all over the world?
- How to orchestrate the different initiatives towards the common good?
- What kind of technologies and global agreements would make possible the international movement of key human resources in the fight against the coronavirus?
We must focus on innovative technologies, practices and methods that attempt to answer these complex questions .
Our patron Richard Kivel, told us a decade ago in this video what social innovation is: “New strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds, from working conditions and education to community development and health, and that strengthen civil society.”
Innovation must be based on the adjective “social” that our expert pointed out and point towards what we could call humanistic innovation. In times of crisis, the humanistic approach to innovation will make us right both to solve the current problem and to build a better world for all.
An initiative that goes along these lines, trying to solve the two dilemmas is MiPasa, a Blockchain-based system to detect coronavirus carriers, protecting the right to privacy. It is a global cooperation project with the participation, among others, of the WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the European Union, the United States and China, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Johns Hopkins University and the Government of Canada.
