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Lockdowns were a huge policy mistake. I blame Silicon Valley. I know, I know, the real blame resides with ill-informed technocrats who instituted the draconian and non-Jeffersonian lockdowns: the Trump and Biden administrations, blue-state governors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the rest of the alphabet soup of head-nodding agencies. Yet policy makers implemented lockdowns only because they could—because Silicon Valley provided the tools to lock people in their homes without completely imploding the economy.
Think about it. You couldn’t force lockdowns without laptops, Zoom,
Amazon
deliveries, cloud computing, Slack, QR codes or Netflix. Without them, lockdowns would have lasted two, maybe three weeks tops before the utter destruction of the economy forced everyone back to the workplace. Instead, we took the Faucian bargain of technology-enabled yearlong lockdowns because it was doable. Silicon Valley’s tools became shackles.
Lockdowns came with huge costs: job losses, increased crime, stunted learning, delayed medical treatments, violent protests, government spending blowouts, supply-chain disruptions, inflation, mental-health issues—all avoidable. Like bad air days, I fear bad carbon days will soon invoke climate-emergency lockdowns to keep people from driving.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. The latest example is the plan to install cameras on every New York City subway car to limit crime. Gov.
Kathy Hochul
said, “You think Big Brother is watching you on the subways? You’re absolutely right. That is our intent.” Privacy advocates, such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, are naturally up in arms. Its statement reads, “Living in a sweeping surveillance state shouldn’t be the price we pay to be safe.”
Smart cities are now possible. Surveillance cameras, congestion pricing, timed traffic lights, buses that actually show up on time, balanced electricity usage, it could be urban utopia. But I wonder when smart cities crash, will we turn them off and then back on again? China has already created smart cities and uses data as scoring inputs for its Social Credit System, which stifles freedom for its citizens. Tech giveth and taketh.
The National Traffic Safety Board last week recommended blood-alcohol monitoring for all new vehicles. Another invasion of privacy, although no word yet from the New York Civil Liberties Union. I would rather we accelerate the move to autonomous driving—“Three beers? We steer!” But self-driving cars will cause us to forget how to drive and open a whole new can of oil on the ethics of artificial intelligence, who pays for accidents and more.
More give and take:
is good at finding old friends and helping small businesses connect to consumers via cost-effective targeted ads. But it is now considered evil because of election meddling and “misinformation.” Russia spent $150,000 in 2016 on the most amazingly effective election ads ever. Instagram and TikTok entertain us and track us.
Facial recognition is great at solving unsolvable crimes, but privacy advocates got facial recognition banned in more than a dozen cities from Boston to San Francisco. In 2021
Delta Air Lines
and the Transportation Security Administration launched a test of a facial-recognition system to speed security and plane boarding in Detroit. Great stuff. We shouldn’t kill nascent technology in the crib.
Scientists genetically modified “golden” rice to solve vitamin A deficiency. They also genetically modified viruses to add “gain of function.” Where do we draw the line? Crispr, the latest gene-editing tool, performs medical miracles and might eliminate sickle-cell and Tay-Sachs diseases. The technology can also modify the surface of pig cells to remove sugar modules and minimize human rejection of implanted pig organs. It is a brave new world. But Crispr can also do what is known as a “gene drive” to modify or eliminate entire species. That might be good for killing invasive wasps, but we should reread
Kurt Vonnegut’s
“Cat’s Cradle” for the story of ice-nine.
I brought my vehicle, with its flashy but finicky electronics, to have its software updated, and the dealer bricked it. It’s dead in the shop for over two months waiting on a new control board. Good, bad and ugly.
Just because technology exists doesn’t mean we have to use it. Algorithms and no-doc loans sped up home buying and led to the 2008 financial crisis. The new electric Dodge Charger Daytona has a synthetic exhaust setup that “mimics the roar of a 797-horsepower Hellcat.” I know people who pour liquid smoke on kale and call it bacon. I’m not sure I like these trends.
Technology is unstoppable. We don’t need to erect barriers, but we do need guardrails to maximize what technology gives and put policy in place to prevent its use from taking away our liberties. Over the past 32 months, our leaders have failed in that mission.
Write to kessler@wsj.com.
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