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Language: en-US
- The coronavirus pandemic
is a global crisis,
but I think it's also a
moment that unites us,
that gives us an opportunity
to show the strength
of our community, to be compassionate
to our fellow human
beings, and to work hard
to fight this thing, and I think we will,
and I think we'll beat it.
So I wanted to make a
video about, in my view,
seven different levels
at which the coronavirus
is attacking the fundamental
nature of our society,
and how we can fight back
and how we can emerge stronger together.
The seven levels of attack
are biological and medical,
level number one, that attacks
the individual human life
and death and the biology,
the wellbeing, the health,
of an individual human being.
Psychological, which is attacking
the emotional stability,
the fear and the ability to
love and be compassionate
towards our fellow human beings
in the individual psychology of a person.
Level number three is social,
which is attacking the
collective cognition,
the collective intelligence
of our species,
instilling panic, the
spread of misinformation,
spread of conspiracies.
Level number four is economic,
attacking the financial
stability of our global markets,
the employment of individuals,
productivity, and generally,
the financial burden,
especially the imbalance
of the financial burden
carried by individuals.
Level number five is political,
exacerbating the
partisanship and the ability
to make effective policy
and respond to the virus
at the federal, at the global scale.
Level number six is existential,
which is taking, perhaps,
a step back from the concerns
of the current natural pandemic
and looking at
civilization-level extinction,
looking at existential threats
that may be among us today
and may be posed to us
in this coming century,
from artificial intelligence,
to nanotechnology,
to engineered pandemics,
and other concerns.
And level seven is
really taking a step back
and looking at the philosophical.
The test the virus presents to us,
to consider the fundamental
fabric of the human condition
at the individual level
and the societal level.
What are we supposed to be together?
How are we supposed to live?
What is the meaning of it all?
And what is the best path
forward for us as a society
in the coming decades,
in the coming centuries?
The meaning of life, as silly, perhaps,
and unanswerable the question is,
is also perhaps the most
important question of all,
and if there's ever a time
to consider, to ponder,
to try to answer that question, it is now.
It's an opportunity
that the virus presents.
So if you'll allow me I'd like to talk
to the seven different levels
of attack from coronavirus
in a video that's a little
bit different, perhaps,
than some of the videos
out there, and certainly,
from the videos that I'm used to making.
I've been doing a lot of data
aggregation and analysis,
a lot of simulation for
forecasting purposes,
even simulation for revealing
the mathematical patterns
in the spread of a pandemic.
There's a lot of interesting
ideas there that I hope
to explore either privately or publicly
through the video format,
or blogs or even papers,
but this video is higher level,
it's thinking of the big
picture of this virus.
So if you'll allow me, I'd
like to talk about three things
for each of the levels.
One is the pain we're likely
to feel, two is the challenge
for us to overcome, and three is the hope,
the silver lining, the light
at the end of the tunnel.
It's really important to mention
that if there's any errors
or expansions possible on
something I say in this video,
please let me know.
I will add corrections and
expansions into the description,
so please also read the
description to the video.
The burden I carry with
making a video like this,
and future videos on the coronavirus,
is mistakes here could cost lives.
So I'm very cognizant of
that, I'm very careful.
Please read the description.
Please let me know if there's
any errors in the data,
or just even the wording
of the things I say.
So looking at level one
first, at the biological
and the medical, the
direct attack of the virus
on the human body.
It's very difficult to make
projections about the number
of cases that we're likely to observe,
at least in the first wave,
and the number of deaths
that we're likely to observe.
Many people, including myself,
are carefully looking at
the data, aggregating it,
analyzing it, but it's
still not a good time
to make a good projection.
It is perhaps a good, hopeful message
to consider the best case scenario,
if the governments respond
swiftly, if we all do our part,
if the hospital resources
don't become overwhelmed,
it's possible that the level
of deaths that we observe
is at or below the levels
of annual influenza deaths,
which is still a tragic, a tragic number.
Now, if the response is
not swift from governments
and individuals doing our part,
then the worst case number
of deaths could count in the millions.
Still too difficult to
tell, but this virus,
from everything we see,
on the biological side,
is much more dangerous than the
influenza virus and the flu.
So this level is one that
there's already been a lot
of great information on
blogs, papers, videos, CDC.
You should make sure
you're paying attention,
but the message is clear.
For individuals, you should
stay home, social isolation,
social distancing, wash
hands, don't get infected,
and don't infect others.
For the medical infrastructure,
the people really fighting,
really heroes, fighting on the front lines
are the healthcare workers
and the service workers,
making sure our society still
runs, making sure people
who are sick are getting help.
The thing that I've seen, as I understand,
that works really well,
is the testing quickly,
testing early, and treating
when treatment is needed,
and also for people who
are sick, tracing to see
who are the individuals
they interacted with,
so they can be properly socially isolated.
Of course, on the science
side, a lot of brilliant people
are working on a treatment on
antiviral drugs and vaccines,
and on the engineering,
manufacturer, logistics side,
people are working to
manufacture ventilators,
test kit, protective equipment like masks.
This is a huge, global effort.
Now, the hope is we, in
this immediate response,
we flatten the curve,
we don't overwhelm healthcare resources,
and we minimize the loss of life.
One of the most difficult
things here is for doctors
to make life and death decisions.
I would like to recommend a book
called Mountains Beyond
Mountains by Tracy Kidder,
which tells the story of Paul Farmer.
It's the first time I realized,
and it might be cliche
to say, but it really is
true that doctors, nurses,
and healthcare workers
are heroes, and that book
was the first time I realized
that many of the decisions
we make are beyond reason.
They're some of the most
complicated ethical decisions
you have to make.
You have to listen to your heart,
and those are the decisions,
deeply human decisions
that doctors have to make,
and at this biological,
this medical level of life,
of human life and human death,
doctors are really, and
nurses and health workers,
are really at the front lines
of making those most difficult decisions.
That is such an important fight.
They truly are heroes.
I recommend the book highly
to highlight the burden
that these folks have to carry.
Now the hope is, if the response is swift,
and we all do our part,
that this turns out
to be as close to the
best case as possible,
and then it serves as a dress rehearsal
for a much worse pandemic,
that could cost a lot more,
both economic impact and
the loss of human life,
and that means we can
now look into the future
and invest in science,
invest in the healthcare infrastructure,
such that future responses
could be much more swift
or much more prepared for
something catastrophic,
truly catastrophic.
And finally, the hope is
that we can discuss the role
of technology in all this
in the years to come.
Information truly is power
in controlling the spread
of a pandemic, but
information, data, is something
that requires that we strike a balance
between privacy and health,
and that requires a discussion
about who controls, who manages,
who regulates the technology
in terms of how privacy is preserved.
The second level at which the
virus is attacking our society
is the individual human emotion.
Fear is real, fear of losing your job,
fear of losing your health or
the health of the loved ones,
fear of losing basic
resources like water and food
and power, and there also
could just be, fundamentally,
a fear of uncertainty
which can lead to tensions
within the family and within
the small, inner social circle.
Now the key there is to stay calm.
It's so important for
reason to override emotion,
especially in decision-making,
so stay calm, stay informed.
This might be difficult to say,
but this is also a good time
to reevaluate your life
journey, to ask the question,
am I living my dream?
Am I living my passion?
This is a good time, as any,
for a personal revolution,
to start over, to do the thing
you've always wanted to do,
to start writing, to
start reading, to learn,
take an online class, to pivot
in your own personal journey.
If you're a business owner,
to pivot the structure
of your business, the thing
it's doing, the underlying ideas
behind the business, the
scale of the business,
rethink everything.
This is a good time for
a personal revolution.
Now this can be extremely painful,
especially for people
living paycheck to paycheck,
who have to support a
family, but this is the time.
If there's ever a time,
this is the time to do it,
to rethink, what do the coming days,
weeks, and months look like?
How can you change your life
so you can truly live
your dream, your passion,
and provide for your family,
provide for yourself,
provide for your family, and
be the best person you can be?
This is the time for
that personal revolution.
Again, it might be very painful,
but this is the time for it.
My hope at this level,
the psychological level
of the individual, is that
we use this opportunity
to reevaluate our lives,
to take a leap forward
at something you've always wanted to do.
And in general, my hope
is that we overcome fear,
the natural fear of
uncertainty, and lean in,
lean into love, compassion
for our fellow human beings,
resist the desire to be afraid,
lean into being
compassionate towards others.
Level three is social.
Social distancing,
really should be called
physical distancing,
that we're all practicing,
has led us to lean in,
to rely on social media for connection,
for basic human connection,
and for information.
So it has served as a gradual replacement
of our own individual
thinking, which is much easier
to practice in the physical
world, and more reliance
on the kind of collective
cognition, the hive mind,
that's represented by social networks.
And what that results
is, is a magnification
of level two attack of the
virus, on the fear and panic
that can spread that
contagion on social networks.
So social networks are much more effective
at spreading an individual human emotion,
such that it becomes a mass human emotion
of our collective cognition,
of our collective mind,
and again, that also applies
to not just fear and emotion,
it applies to misinformation,
non-scientific,
anti-scientific
information, and, of course,
conspiracy theories.
So that's another level at which the virus
attacks our society, and
due to the efficiency
of social media, is perhaps
one of the most novel aspects
of this pandemic.
Now the challenge for us, at
the individual human level,
is self-reflection,
meditation, detach yourself.
Yuval Harari in 21 Lessons
for the 21st Century
talks about this in the
last chapter for meditation,
is to detach ourselves
from this hive mind,
to think on ourselves, to
do the self-reflection,
to hear our own inner
voice, inner thoughts,
not allow the wave of
information, of panic,
that can travel to social
media, to impact us fully.
It should be something
we can simply observe,
as opposed to deeply internalize.
Again, the really important
thing here is looking,
finding, digging for facts.
That means looking at source information,
source scientific information,
as opposed to derived opinion
pieces on that information.
And most importantly, think
critically on your own.
Just because the group that
you're supposed to belong to,
whether that's political or
social, thinks a certain way
doesn't mean you should think that way.
Remove the power of the hive
mind by thinking on your own.
Now my hope is, at this level,
this becomes a jarring wake-up call
of how we use social media as a society.
One, in terms of controlling
spread of misinformation,
and two, in terms of the way we connect
with other human beings on social media,
as opposed to giving in to the drug,
the dopamine-fueled drama of social media,
of clicking likes and tracking likes
and getting angry at the
drama and attention, so on.
More seeing it as another medium
in which we can encourage deep connection
with other human beings, friendships,
real positive, good vibes.
It might be naive to say,
but I think it's actually possible.
It's both a technology problem
and it's a society problem
of how we define the standards
of how we behave in the social world.
It's a good wake-up call to look at that.
In a time of panic, we come together,
and there's no reason
we can't stay together
in this kind of way online.
Now level four is economic,
and this could be the most painful
of the impacts of the virus.
Day by day, the projections
are getting worse and worse
from the economists.
Some economists, more and more,
are predicting double-digit drops in GDP
in the second quarter.
The real pain that people
are already feeling,
and will feel more and
more, is the loss of jobs.
Many economists are predicting millions,
three to seven millions, of US
jobs lost before the summer.
Now these are jobs in
the service industry,
hotel, travel, restaurants,
many folks already living
paycheck to paycheck.
This is real pain and burden
that a lot of families
will have to carry, and on
the small business side,
this is difficult to measure
but surveys of business owners
are saying that in just
three months, 50% of them
do not see a way to avoid bankruptcy.
So that's a much longer
lasting impact on the fabric
of our, the United States
capitalist society,
where small businesses, in many ways,
are the backbone of our society.
The challenge for a citizen
is to hold politicians accountable
as they develop a fiscal stimulus package.
It's really important,
drawing lessons from the
2008 financial crisis,
that the bailout, the
fiscal stimulus that passes
is one that benefits
the people that need it,
the workers who lose their
job, the small businesses
on the verge of bankruptcy.
As a consumer, at least
in the United States,
consumer spending is a big part
of the US economy, the 70%,
so, if you can afford it,
continuing spending money
on things you need,
especially to support local
and small businesses, and
finally, as a business,
as a small business, this is
an opportunity to reinvent,
to add an online company
to diversify, to pivot.
That might be really
painful, difficult to say.
I recently left my job.
I was facing a bank
account with nothing in it,
and there's a lot of
reinvention and pivoting
that was required to do.
I'm working on building a
startup that brings in no money,
so I had to figure out how can
I make money in the meantime?
Now that kind of thing could
be exceptionally painful,
especially if it requires learning skills
that you don't have, but I
think if you face this fear,
taking this step where
you reinvent the business
could be the best
decision you've ever made.
It could be very painful
in the short term,
but exceptionally
profitable and liberating
in the long term.
So this is the time, as
I mentioned before, for,
if you're a small business
owner, for a personal revolution.
Now, my hope is, as it
is for everybody else,
that once we reopen our society,
that the fiscal stimulus
not just carries us through but allows us
to resume consumer spending
as quickly as possible
so that the recovery is, as
they say, a V versus a U,
that it's an immediate and
aggressive and quick recovery,
and also, it's a very dark and
perhaps a little bit Russian
of me to think of the
silver lining of this,
but one of the positive
aspects of the pain that people
are feeling is that a lot of people
are feeling that pain together.
We're in this together.
Majority of the lower
class and the middle class
will be feeling the pain of
shutting down the economy.
We're in this together.
There's something, if just
a little bit comforting,
that the pain you feel is
the pain that's also felt
by your neighbors.
Again, the hope is that
it brings us together.
Level five is political.
I think it's not an
exaggeration to say we're living
in one of the most divided
times, politically,
in the history of the United
States, of our country,
and especially on the heels
of the United States President
being impeached, and
the election coming up,
at least to the
politicization of everything,
including the virus,
and that's a huge pain,
and that's a really damaging attack vector
along which the virus
can exploit our society,
at least this nation, and also,
outside of the partisanship,
this is a time for the
government to pass policy
to respond to the virus, and there is,
as always through history,
through wars, through pandemics,
through big global crises,
there's a diminishment
of our rights and freedoms,
and that is another attack
of the virus on the fabric of our society.
The challenge for our citizens
is to not let charlatans
in the government of any party affiliation
capitalize on our fear, as
I described in level two,
the psychological, the
emotional, by overreaching power.
So this could look like anything,
it could look like mass surveillance,
it could look like martial law,
individual city, states, federal.
It could look like detaining
people without trial,
which we're already starting to see,
and, God forbid, canceling elections,
so really attacking the
fundamental nature of democracy.
We have seen this throughout history.
As citizens of this democratic nation,
we have to stay vigilant to this threat.
On the scientific front,
I think it's really, really important
that we do not look at the coronavirus
through a political lens.
It should not be a red and blue issue.
It should be something
where we trust the expert,
the scientific information,
the best data available,
should not be seen through a
lens of the partisan divide
that has driven so much
of our public discourse
about federal policy,
because the one-plus-trillion-dollar
stimulus package
that Congress is trying
to pass is something
that can make or break
this economy, or rather,
it can make the difference
between the V- and the U-shaped recovery,
fast recovery or delayed
multi-month recovery
where a lot of people will suffer.
It's exceptionally
important to get this right
and politics should not
come at all into play
into the decisions being
made by our policymakers.
So the hope is, once we beat this thing,
is that we rethink the federal
infrastructure that responds
to global threats, really
invest back into it,
try to see government in
this one regard as something
that could really unite the people
in an effective, timely, quick response.
The hope is we're reminded of
the importance of government,
and then we reinvigorate this,
the basic unit of a democracy,
which is the citizen,
and remind us that we can
accomplish a lot of things
if we work together, so
not through divisiveness,
but on really big important issues
and things we really should
all agree on, working together.
This is a good reminder.
Just like going to the
moon was a good reminder
of what science and engineering
could do at a large scale,
this is what's needed now.
This virus perhaps should
serve as a good reminder
that good science, good
engineering at scale
is essential for us to work together on
to respond to these kinds
of things in the future,
and just to create, progress
forward to make a better world
in a lot of different dimensions.
It continues to be a huge
surprise to me that science,
not always but sometimes,
enters the world of politics,
and politicians play games
with scientific facts.
They question the validity of findings
of individual personalities in science.
I think people, my hope
is that they understand
that, on especially the
most important questions,
there's thousands of scientists
trying to disprove each other.
This kind of collective
mechanism is really good
at cutting out all the BS
and getting to the core,
the truth of things.
Science cannot answer all questions.
There's some, to me, some of
the most important questions
about ethics is impossible
for science to answer
but the basic questions of the mechanism
that threaten our wellbeing,
especially in the biological,
chemical, and physical world,
science is really well-equipped to answer,
and we should not politicize
that extremely powerful
mechanism that can protect us,
that can build big, amazing cool things
that make our life easier, better.
Just create a better world.
And I hope that we emerge
as a society that can bicker
and politicize everything
else, but science
and scientific experts
are something we trust.
Level six is existential.
You can say evolutionary even.
The human species has not always existed,
and there's no guarantee
we'll always exist.
Perhaps this is not the right time
to be deeply thinking about this question.
We want to deal with the threat at hand,
but I recommend a lot of
excellent work been written
on existential risks from
Nick Bostrom and others
at the Future of Humanity
Institute and other institutions.
In general, considering what
are the different threats
that our human civilization is facing
in the next hundred years
that could lead to extinction,
or lead to a large number of people
being either displaced or killed.
Now this goes everything
from global warming,
to nuclear war, to
nanotechnology accident,
to molecular nanotechnology weapons,
to different kinds of weapons,
to things that I've spoken a
lot about, think a lot about,
is super intelligent AI,
artificial general intelligence systems,
and then there's pandemics,
the natural pandemic of coronavirus
that we're experiencing now,
and then there's a lot of concern
about engineering pandemics,
the kind of risks they pose
to our civilization.
The pandemic we're
experiencing now is unlikely
to be a species extinction level event,
but it serves as a dress rehearsal,
something that reveals the
fragility of our species.
Things that feel, in the
moment, totally unexpected,
and yet are completely expected
if you listen to the experts.
Experts on pandemics are predicting
that there will be a much
worse one coming, for sure.
For me, personally, I work
in artificial intelligence.
I embody a lot of different views
but certainly because I program
and build a lot of systems,
what you call narrow AI systems,
there's a clear awareness
of how far we are
from creating super
intelligent AI systems,
and I could talk at length
about why I see that
as an exceptionally difficult
problem on many levels,
especially the kind of AI systems
that could destroy human civilization,
but I think at this level,
the coronavirus pandemic
has really changed my mind,
has given me a wake-up call,
to think more clearly
about the unexpected,
that the things that
threaten us may come in ways
we don't expect, so we have
to be exceptionally careful,
especially when we work
in that particular field.
I'm not an expert in
pandemics, I'm not an expert
in molecular nanotechnology
nor nuclear terrorism,
but I am, I hate the word expert,
but I'm somewhat knowledgeable
in the world of AI,
and so it's my responsibility
to look bigger,
to think bigger, about the things
that are totally unexpected
that may threaten the wellbeing
of many of our, especially
most vulnerable members
of our society, but really,
everybody, and so the challenge
for us as a society as we
emerge from this pandemic
is to invest in scientific
research on all these avenues,
to be prepared way ahead of time
to some of the threats posed here,
especially, what research does
is it doesn't only reveal mechanism
of how we can protect us,
but it reveals the
possible vectors of attack
that could be expected, so
just investing in research,
getting more people to
think about this problem,
I think, is exceptionally important,
to prepare society, to
prepare scientific minds
in the tooling, the engineering,
infrastructure required
to respond to a problem
before it kills a billion or more people.
And finally, level seven, philosophical,
really taking a step back.
It's much more difficult
to be eloquent about this,
so I'll mention a book that
had a big impact in my life,
and rings true in many of its lessons,
is The Plague by Albert Camus.
Now, in the world that
Camus paints in The Plague,
suffering seems to be something
that's just a part of life,
and the question that life poses to us
is how do we respond to that suffering?
How do we deal with that suffering?
And at least to me, the
lessons I draw from it
is that love for our fellow human beings,
compassion for others, is the
way we conquer that suffering.
The natural inclination, perhaps at first,
is to turn in to yourself
because everything in life,
in your existence, is going
to be a source of pain,
a source of loss, a source of suffering,
and so you want to isolate yourself,
you want to separate
yourself, you want to run away
from that, but the reality is, somehow,
that seems to be part
of the human condition,
is that going to yourself,
hiding from life,
running away from life is,
from others, from society,
is actually not a way to remove
suffering from your life.
That somehow stokes the
fire of pain, of dread,
and so the way to overcome
that, the meaning of life,
I guess you could say, for
Camus, is to love others,
and the book itself serves as
an allegory for World War II,
and my relatives, the
society of the Soviet Union
in which I was born and raised in,
is so deeply grounded into,
in the story of World War II
and the pain of World
War II, and the lessons
that emerged there is that,
as painful it is to say,
all that suffering, all
that death, what emerges
is that love for each other conquers all.
Love of community, and that's
my hope, is that we emerge
from this at the highest
level, from this virus,
with a greater sense of
community, with a greater sense
for the value of community, for the love
for our fellow human
beings, for the compassion
for our fellow human beings.
My hope is that this virus is a reminder
that love is the meaning of life.
Thank you for watching this video.
I hope it's of value for some people.
I hope it helps, and
again, I love you all.