Decoded for A Higher Calling

"What's science? Science is connecting the dots. " This is what I read to my toddler boy about 20 years ago. Today, he is a computer-machine learning-NLP scientist in making. And I remain awed by how humanity has been connecting and continue to connect the dots of our existence and evolution in the past century by discovring the atom, the bit and the gene. Some scholars call them the three fundamental kernels of our existence and scientific revolutions.

From the beginning of the 20th century with Albert Einstein's 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, to the second half of the 20th century's information-technology that can decode information with binary digits, to a more momentum life-science revolution with the biotech, scientists have been progressing in decoding our physical world, human and machine behaviors, and the genes and molecules of human and any organism's DNA's.

As we have learned, advances in basic science become always the seed for useful inventions. In the five decades following Einstein’s miracle year, his theories and those of his fellow physicists led to atomic bombs and nuclear power, semiconductors and transistors, spaceships and GPS, lasers and radar. Then in the 1950s, because of the discovery of bits, all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches, and this led to the development of the microchip, the computer and the internet. When combined, these three innovations led to the digital revolution.

The current global COVID-19 pandemic, once-in-a-century sort of health crisis, continues to spread, hurting more than one million people's health and taking tens of thousands' lives. Humanity is literally living in HELL! While scientists are totally on board to inform and educate decision-makers and the general public how to act and cut off the virus' transmission routes by social distancing and shelter-in-place, they are expected more crucially and urgently to provide the light at the end of the tunnel to not only stop the virus spreads, but also come up with effective cures and vaccines, and prevent future pandemics.

CRISPR - Decoding Life for Health

In the biological world, there seems an arms race on two fronts. A biological arms race and a biotech arms race. The biological arms race occurs between bacteria and virus. Scientists discovered that, for three billion years, bacteria have struggled to fight off attacks by viruses, which are snippets of genetic material that reproduce by taking over the cells of living organisms. The biotech arms face is happening among leading nations, especially among major economies, especially US, China and EU. "Search for Coronavirus Vaccine Becomes a Global Competition" is a very recent headline of an article of NYTimes.

How does the coronavirus attack our immune system? It turns out that the virus uses its spike proteins, armatures on the outside of the virus to grab and penetrate the outer walls of human and animal cells. The spike protein has two important features: the receptor-binding domain (RBD), a kind of grappling hook that grips onto host cells, and the cleavage site, a molecular can opener that allows the virus to crack open and enter host cells.

Today, one of the key scientific breakthroughs at the beginning of this century is to sequence and map our genes and those of every organism. CRISPR is a consequential invention of this revolution and now a tool that will allow us to edit genes. CRISPR systems are a wondrous method that bacteria came up with to remember, recognize and destroy the genetic material of enemy viruses.

Think about this in animated visual. The CRISPR surveillance complex consists of proteins that wrap around a guide RNA like a grasping hand, exposing specific sections of this RNA. These sections scan viral DNA, looking for genetic sequences they recognize. This system can quickly read through massive lengths of DNA and accurately hit its target. If the CRISPR complex identifies a viral DNA target, the surveillance machine recruits other molecules to destroy the virus's genome. Today, CRISPR tools are already being developed that will detect the virus and, eventually, ward it off.

But we often also see failures on the part of the CRISPR when virus defeats the bacterial immune system, as reflected by the current coronavirus pandemic which has been literally destroying many people's immune system and claim many lives. This is part of the biological arms race between virus and bacteria. Scientists find that viruses have at least a couple of anti-CRISPR strategies. One strategy is to simply counterattack. Viruses can deploy proteins that disable CRISPR machinery. Another strategy is to misdirect CRISPR. Evidently, viruses can fool the CRISPR system into binding an expendable viral protein instead of essential viral DNA.

There has been a global wake-up call that biotechology is a strategic industry for our society. For the rest decades of the 21st century, the biotech revolution is expected to help fight viruses at the molecular level using RNA-guided genetic targeting devices (just like bacteria do), while contributing to discover the underlying mechanisms of cancer and finding ways to personalize treatments for it, and edit our own genes for much improved health and resilience.

Digitalization - Surveillance Society and Capitalism

The debate on surveillance enabled by digital revolution is literally ON today. The focus is how to ensure people's privacy and privacy right is protected when governments around the world are mobilizing all kinds of surveillance tools to monitor and track the spread of coronavirus. From China to South Korea, from Singapore to Israel and the US, when all the nations and cities were locked down to encourage and enforce social distancing, surveillance technologies seem to offer some of the best and most efficient tools to ensure enforcement. I call this COVID Surveillance.

Information technology, ushered in the second half of the last century, is turning everyone and everything digital. Humanity is connected most ubiquitously ever via telecommunication and smart devices. Not only developed nations, but emerging economies and most developing countries have been leapfrogging and catching up. With continued investment into digital infrastructure and rapid development of information technology industries, as well as products and services, governments is empowered more than ever to govern their nations through digital surveillance. The COVID Surveillance is just an integrated example of the day.

As we have learned, ubiquitous connectivity enables many governments to gather location data from smartphones and data from mobile networks and other devices. In China, government-installed CCTV cameras point at the apartment door of those under a 14-day quarantine to ensure compliance. Drones Tell people to wear their masks. And digital barcodes on mobile apps highlight individual's health status. Some residents in Hong Kong were made to wear a wristband which linked to a smartphone app and could alert authorities if a person left their location of quarantine.

The Singapore government launched an app - TraceTogether, that uses Bluetooth signals between cellphones to see if potential carriers of the coronavirus have been in close contact with other people. South Korean government used combined records of credit cards transactions, smartphone location data and CCTV video and conversations with people to create a system to track confirmed cases, presented in a map to inform people whether they had gone near a virus carrier.

In the US, the Patriot Act, signed into law after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, gives federal government broad surveillance powers to aid their counterterrorism efforts. Initially due to expire in 2005, the Act was renewed and now got another short-term renewable until later this year. The federal government is now talking to Facebook, Google and other technology companies about the possibility of using location and movement data from Americans' smartphones to combat coronavirus. 

The COVID Surveillance is a showcase of the power of information technology and also a real-life case study for stakeholders to debate and figure out how to balance emergency response like the pandemic and people's privacy rights protection. For now, Singapore said its TraceTogether app does not record location data or access the phone user’s contact list. Data logs are stored on phones in encrypted form, according to the government. South Korea said its information collection efforts will end when the coronavirus outbreak is over and that all personal data will be deleted.

We'll see what will happen next. Fingers crossed. But deep down at the core of the debate and concerns are two things - Surveillance State, and Surveillance Capitalism. The former endangers people's privacy and the latter exploits people's surplus of behavior futures. Technology today makes all secrets more difficult to keep. The awesome technology force of 1s and 0s, the binary digital magic or the bits, fuels the revolutionary and disruptive change.

Today, we have unprecedented capability of data collection and data storage. The amount of data that can be stored is nearly infinite and nearly everything that happens from now on has the potential to be stored indefinitely. And we have ever more sophisticated computer algorithms that make it possible to sift through and analyze larger and larger slices of that data.

How does the State Surveillance work? In the US, the National Security Agency began collecting people's telephone and Internet records from technology and communications companies, and the House of Representatives on July 24 of 2013 gave a fresh thumbs-up to further NSA collections by a narrow 12-vote margin, 217-205. 

While the scope of surveillance today is much broader than in the past, Americans long ago grew accustomed to limits on privacy. The Supreme Court has held that information voluntarily given to third parties is no longer secret, nor can people expect privacy to cloak their actions in public places or communications via the public airwaves. The government can intercept radio signals and is allowed to read what’s written on the outside of your mail. It’s just a step—granted, a large step—from those principles to the ones that underpin today’s massive data collections.

Surveillance Society is a useful concept that enables us to mount an ethical, social and spatial critique of the information processing practices which are part of the way society is formed, governed and managed. It enables us to question and evidence its impact on the social fabric: on discrimination, trust, accountability, transparency, access to services, mobility, freedoms, community and social justice. Moreover it enables us to engage in debates with regulators, businesses and journalists about the consequences of their surveillance-based activities. 

Surveillance Capitalism offers us an insightful perspective and framework to understand the new market forces and emerging economic models that is reshaping our society and economy. Harvard University social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff holds that surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation. She characterized Surveillance Capitalism as a "radically dis-embedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on the commodification of "reality" and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales.

She uses "Big Other", a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power which constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy and privacy. She identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism that include 1) the drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis; 2) the development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation; 3) the desire to personalize and customize the services offered to users of digital platforms; and 4) the use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers.

COVID Surveillance can be an episode or a black swan event, triggered by the pandemic, but it is also a harbinger or a kaleidoscope that for us to deep-dive into Surveillance State, surveillance society, surveillance capitalism. In an era of ubiquitous surveillance, more than ever, governments, businesses, society at large shall work together to redefine how we will govern our society, economy, nation and even the world, for a future we all want and choose.

Atoms - The Ethics Dilemma

Ethics is the moral twin of science and technology. Einstein is remembered in history for his genius and contribution to decode the physical world in atom, but he does not control how humanity's other ingenuity and creativity to develop technologies on the basis of his scientific theory. Nuclear weaponry or the H-bomb and their destruction of lives remain forever a reference around the ethics and technology.

CRISPR could let us genetically enhance our bodies and minds and those of our children. I still remember the shiver down my spine when I read the story of a Chinese research team has succeeded in editing the human embryonic genes, but later felt relieved to know that he was put in 3-yr prison with a financial penalty due to in violation of the Chinese regulation. While scientifically viable, Professor Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley University, co-inventor of the technology, actively promotes the ethical discussion and advocates strong regulation to govern CRISPR technology application in human enhancement. We’ll need not only scientists and innovators but also philosophers, humanists and well-informed citizens to figure out whether that’s a wise use of this astonishing technology.

Surveillance technology has a key role to play for humanity to win the war against the coronavirus pandemic. Governments shall consider the ethics of surveillance and intelligence, especially whether it is justified, done under the right authority. These considerations, combined with enhanced transparency and sunset clauses on the use of intelligence and surveillance techniques, can allow governments to ethically deploy these powerful tools to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Global Race for Supremacy and Domination

The year of 2020 is forever remembered as a saddening COVID year. On the positive side, scientific community globally has never been able to concentrate so much, so quickly, expertise and resources to contain the virus and find the cure and vaccine. But on the other, a race among the leading economies is ON, competing for dominance and supremacy of technologies and products. How do we make sure that their achievements, no matter which country has it first, will benefit beyond one single country? A dire consequence is the missing global leadership that is so much needed at a crisis to jointly weather the pandemic.

We are caged! And there are many What-if's. Experts say that actions one week earlier would have saved half of lives now lost and 95% lives saved if three weeks earlier. If travel bans and social distancing were not delayed, the coronavirus would not have been able to take advantage of the human bonds to spread globally. If leaders in major economies worked together from the beginning, many lives would have been saved.

Today we continue to see the rising number of confirmed cases and fatalities worldwide. Public health crisis, economic crisis, and social crisis are depressing humanity to an unprecedented degree. We have been so excited about technology revolution and the power we have to create wealth for ourselves and our children, and yet, the pandemic dwarfed all our dreams and aspiration.

Sad, isn't it?