GeoTech – Digital Crossroads

Here at the Atlantic Council, we recognize that working to benefit people, prosperity, and peace for all globally requires committed public servants. A year ago in 2019, Dr. Greg Treverton and Dr. Molly Jahn, as well as (the would be future GeoTech Center Director) Dr. David Bray, and other authors released the result of a year-long study that analyzed the impact of numerous long-term trends in the United States’ government workforce over a period of two decades.

The world needs a collective effort to gather and share data to steer society and nations back to full operations, and to provide early indicators and warnings of future pandemics. Current methods for accessing data owned by public and private institutions and private citizens today are not able to guide COVID-19 recovery. The new data access frameworks in this initiative can succeed while strengthening societal welfare, prosperity, and peace around the world.

The world needs a global Pandemic Prevention Board focused on building an “Immune System for the Planet”, as described in early April by the GeoTech Center by Dr. David Bray and then highlighted in a CNBC article by Atlantic Council CEO Fred Kempe on why tech companies can — and should — build a global quick response system to prevent future pandemics.

Dr. Tiffany Vora continues her insights on vaccine hesitancy by laying out a human-centered health campaign approach that multiple sectors, from public health to social media companies, can consider.

Dr. Tiffany Vora shares insights from a recent peer-reviewed investigation of online interactions about vaccination and integrates these insights with an orthogonal approach to understanding vaccine hesitancy.

The decade ahead must be spurred on by a new “Sputnik moment” for the United States to inspire new focus on research and development funding and initiatives to bolster the STEM workforce, while understanding the changing market dynamics connecting funding, innovation, and competitive advantage for open societies.

For the fourth installment of the GeoTech Center’s expert survey series, we asked a range of business leaders and tech experts how COVID-19 has impacted their industry’s or enterprise’s supply chains. Significant shortages of personal protective equipment and tests have plagued hospitals, and many countries’ dependence on China quickly became evident in the initial rush to obtain supplies. Food supply chains have also been significantly disrupted–for instance, infection rates at meat packing plants are five-times greater than those in similar geographies.

Tech companies have the resources to help us better manage this pandemic. If you are a leader of tech company today, what could be of greater benefit to your company than a healthy population, a revitalized global economy, and new international capabilities to fight this crisis, and the next one?

Our approaches for pathogen detection and antigen development are too slow. Using high-speed computers, biosensors, and the Internet, we can universalize and automate the process such that we can automatically sense an abnormal pathogen and immediately start synthesizing in a computer’s memory techniques to mitigate it. Once an abnormal pathogen is detected, we can automate the antigen development to have a solution ready much faster for possible use than conventional means. Together, we can build an auto-immune system for the planet.

On a radically transformed planet, different conceptual maps are necessary for understanding what today’s priorities must be. These maps, or mental models, inform the framing that policy and decision makers use to weigh their options. Limitations in our conceptual frames can drastically limit the scope of considered futures.

In retrospect, the COVID-19 pandemic may mark a paradigm shift in global society if governments and their citizens worldwide today embrace its lessons, including many still emerging. One of these lessons concerns the dangers of ignoring knowledge we already had about interconnections between global public health, economic and national security, and ecological degradation.

This blog post series will explore the meaning of a “just society” through multiple lenses and in the context of today’s challenges, including but not limited to the coronavirus pandemic. With contributions from multiple authors, it aims to stimulate thinking and questions that distill the prerequisites and responsibilities for “just societies” in our times. COVID-19 spotlights […]

The GeoTech Center’s mission is to define practicable initiatives to ensure new technologies and advances in data capabilities benefit people, prosperity, and peace in open societies. Its overarching goal is a “world comprised of just societies.” The GeoTech’s mandate is an ambitious one and, while focused on applying new technologies to solutions to global problems, is anchored in an explicit assumption that its efforts will promote just societies.

This article examines what the data and tech communities can do about racism, specifically instances where tech products and services provide different treatment based on how people present, specifically their skin color, names, and other markers of not being what ‘white’ which is a term loaded with both non-inclusive and unjust connotations.

Data has been weaponized against marginalized communities. Now, it must be transformed to be a force for good.