Living with COVID

What will it take for AI to be fully effective against future pandemics?

The pandemic has presented an opportunity for big tech to truly step up and show its potential: to put the highly regarded AI technologies to use in finding drugs and vaccines, to use delivery services to reach the elderly and vulnerable, to support global recovery using the vast data and resources at their disposal. Indeed AI has massively enabled the vaccine roll out and speeded up testing times via automation. However, many argue that big tech and AI have failed to reach their full potential in the prevention and eradication of the virus. Contact tracing apps have not worked to maximum effect and the inconsistency of broadband coverage has widened the digital divide. This poses an important question: what will it take for AI to be fully effective in the fight against future pandemics?

The key question here is around data privacy and whether or not successful AI requires trade-offs in this area. Looking first at the highly contentious issues of contact tracing apps, we are faced with deciding what is more important to us, an effective contact tracing app or basic levels of privacy? According to the nonprofit Privacy International, at least 27 countries have begun using cellphone data to track the spread of the coronavirus. Whilst contact tracing apps have yet to impress, the more allowances we make regarding our privacy, the more effective they will be, as is the way with AI technologies that require large amounts of relevant data to be most effective.

As we are all eagerly anticipating the first summer holiday after the pandemic, phrases such as ‘universal travel passport’ are being tossed around. Once again we are faced with challenging questions around data privacy, do we want to trade our healthcare data to be able to travel? Perhaps more worryingly we have to consider whether we are comfortable with transnational organisations such as Google or Apple running this ‘service.’ It has become clear that a contact tracing app or travel passport of any kind would be ineffective without the cooperation of Apple and Google, whose operating systems power 99% of the world’s smartphones.

As we are finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the past year, one question remains the most pressing; how can it be that in 2021 the best defence at our borders was a digital thermometer? We need to ask the questions of how the world failed to use tech to spot the virus quickly to put controls in place to stop the spread and whether we are willing to sacrifice levels of privacy to ensure that we are better prepared next time.