Why tech didn’t save us from covid-19

Image: Selman Design. Article by David Rotman.

America’s paralysis reveals a deep and fundamental flaw in how the nation thinks about innovation.

Technology has failed the US and much of the rest of the world in its most important role: keeping us alive and healthy. As I write this, more than 380,000 are dead, the global economy is in ruins, and the covid-19 pandemic is still raging. In an age of artificial intelligence, genomic medicine, and self-driving cars, our most effective response to the outbreak has been mass quarantines, a public health technique borrowed from the Middle Ages. […]

The test of the country’s innovation system will be whether over the coming months it can invent vaccines, treatments, and tests, and then produce them at the massive scale needed to defeat covid-19. “The problem hasn’t gone away,” says CMU’s Fuchs. “The global pandemic will be a fact of life—the next 15 months, 30 months—and offers an incredible opportunity for us to rethink the resiliency of our supply chains, our domestic manufacturing capacity, and the innovation around it.”

It will also take some rethinking of how the US uses AI and other new technologies to address urgent problems. But for that to happen, the government has to take on a leading role in directing innovation to meet the public’s most pressing needs. […]

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