Should we live the rest of our lives with fear of leaving home, fearing the neighbor or the bystander? Is it worth it to keep living this way? Are the technological means the answer? These and other questions rise as we continue in this confinement that everyday becomes more unsustainable from the economic and the society point of view, as we have been living as social beings for over 300.000 years that we are walking on this planet. And the vaccine doesn’t seem to be the answer either since it’s so far in time with all necessary ethnicity trails, the foreseen low effectiveness and the risks associated with it.
Tech companies are getting stronger every day during this period and apparently there is answer to everything and with different competitors: Shopping Amazon, Dating Tinder, food Ubereats, entertainment Netflix, shared work Teams and Zoom for all kinds of meetings (school, University, work, parties, etc.). And all of this under the umbrella of the internet where we are being the target of tracking all of our conversations, movements, likes, preferences, diseases, conditions, fears and anguishes and at the same time with this information we can be profiled individually to be influenced on each aspect of our lives.
There is no a clear record of a total lockdown or confinement of the whole population for a contagious disease; this is the first time that such a policy has been implemented in the history of humankind. In other times lockdown and confinement was implemented to isolate the sick, in times of war or terrorism. Taking into account the main goal is to save lives and coming back to the living as a society for millennia, we can ask ourselves about the value of life right now (value as something subjective to each one of us):
It is that our lives have the same or less value to ourselves? (pay attention of suicide statistics years before 2020 vs. 2020) Is everyone factoring in the psychological, immunologic and orthopedic treatments of the post-confinement? What about the people that will die of hunger because of the economic crisis, are their lives less valuable or are worth less? Is it that individual life has acquired so much value that we should care for it to the point of destroying the economy and our most intimate instinct of social lifestyle? If we have a clear idea that the remedy is being worse than the disease, why are we still confined?
The answers to these existential questions and the value of life can’t be given by technology, or data engineering; only time will tell if this was the right course of action; what is sure is that in the meanwhile we are losing our liberties and rights in the name of the sanitary emergency and we are getting used to it.