The Disease and The Cure
The world is racing to procure a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Russia, China, the United States, and the UK are current forerunners in this race to combat the virus. There are multiple clinical trials in various stages of production at this moment. A vaccine could only be months away from being produced, and it should become widely available in the next six months. Despite a few false starts in the form of a defective Russian vaccine and a few studies that resulted in volunteers getting sick, most of the trials look incredibly promising so far.
The issue might no longer be the availability of the vaccine, however, as it is expected that many sub-communities and cultures across the globe might have people refusing to take the vaccine altogether. A recent survey of 70,000 people in the UK found that only 49% of the population were very likely to get the vaccine. Almost a fifth of the population actually refused to take the vaccine when it becomes widely available in the coming year.
Anti Vaxxers and Conspiracy Theorists- From joke to bane.
Concerns about the safety of any government-mandated vaccines are even more rampant in countries with populations lacking government trust. The United States, for example, is having trouble enforcing lockdown and there are thousands of “anti-maskers” that see any government policies to spread the virus as encroachments on their freedom. With social media platforms struggling to stop the spread of misinformation pertaining to the virus and the upcoming elections and states struggling with high infection rates, it seems that it might be difficult to convince enough people to take the vaccine to ensure herd immunity.
The anti vaxxer community has already led to a rise in Measles cases in the United States, so it can be expected that there will be enough hold-outs to pose an issue for the health systems of different countries even after the vaccine becomes widely available.
Bond Villain Bill Gates
One of the pieces of misinformation making the rounds in the conspiracy theory communities globally is the idea that the vaccine is an excuse for the government to insert microchips into the bodies of the general population. Whether it was for exerting control or causing illness or tracking information, the end is always the detriment of the unsuspecting “sheep” as they are called in these circles.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of overlap between the conspiracy community and the anti vaxxer communities with similar memes and bits of information being shared across Facebook groups and other social media platforms and WhatsApp groups.
One of the biggest villains in this whole scenario are classified as the “elites”. Individuals with power and influence that are seeking to extend their hold over the people as a whole. The name that comes to the forefront of all this is also the one individual most synonymous with investing in global healthcare and disease prevention- Bill Gates.
Interestingly, Bill Gates was amongst the first public figures to talk about the possibility of a global pandemic. Funnily enough, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk on the concept of a global pandemic back in 2015.
The talk was titled: “We’re not ready for the next epidemic” and served as a grim foreshadowing of how the world eventually dealt with a global pandemic not five years hence.
This one myth of Bill Gates wanting to “chip” us is an incredibly pervasive one. Even in Pakistan, this little bit of misinformation can be found making its rounds in the local Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups even amongst the supposedly educated class.
Now even though it might be difficult to ascertain whether or not Bill Gates is investing huge amounts of money in the production of a Coronavirus vaccine in order to chip everyone’s brains, there is one certain Billionaire who might be doing something very similar and being celebrated for it as well that is going under most conspiracy theorist’s radar.
Elon Musk and the Neural Link
In 2016, the neurobiological company known as Neuralink Corporation was established by Elon Musk and his associates in the Tech and IT industry. By last year, in 2019, more than 150 million dollars worth of funding was pumped into the projects undertaken by Neuralink (with the lion’s share of investment coming from Elon Musk himself).
With a team of neuroscientists recruited from the top universities in the United States, the research progressed by leaps and bounds. The first goal of the company was to develop tiny thread-like devices to treat individuals with different brain disorders or forms of paralysis where the brain is unable to tell the body how to function. Truly inspired by science fiction novels, the idea was to implant devices in the brain that would read the brain waves and transmit the signal to other devices or parts of the body to enable those unable to function to start functioning again and lead some semblance of a normal life.
Even if you get uncomfortable by the idea of having computers read your brain, it still seems like a good and charitable project. Prepare to be creeped out further, however, because eventually, Elon plans to have it installed in healthy individuals looking for “modifications”. This would be the first stage of Transhumanism-where humans transcend the bounds of their bodies and become connected to AI to improve brain function and decision making.
According to Elon Musk, this is to combat the growth of AI technology that he perceives as an existential threat to humanity. Going with the idea of “If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em”, Elon hopes that injecting humanity into AI and forming a symbiosis with technology and Artificial Intelligence might be the only way for humanity to survive into the Transhuman future.
And that kind of world might not, infact, be that far off.
As of 2017, neuroprosthetics has been developed that allow for paraplegics and people with prosthetic limbs to control their artificial limbs using their own brainwaves. The Neuralink devices are already in the animal testing phase (as demonstrated recently using a pig with a neural implant) and is currently in the queue for human testing hopefully late this year.
Higher Considerations
Another thing that needs to be brought into consideration is the fact that if it is possible to communicate with equipment through your mind, the next step is talking to each other via a neural link. There is a certain bandwidth between human beings that is limited by the speed at which they can talk, write, or signal. If this can be replaced by some form of communication that is a communication between human states, it might actually change how people think as well.
Imagine a world where there is no room for any miscommunication between people, privacy concerns aside, it might actually allow us to transcend as a species to something that has never occurred before.
This is not like the internet in the sense that it is limited by what we perceive those words and signals to mean. We are limited by different people having different life experiences and perspectives when it comes to communicating with one another. Every single word has a different nuanced meaning and feeling attached to it that is lost on every other individual. Having a neural link between people’s brains communicating perfectly with each other might even destroy the current concept of what a human is or what human consciousness is.
Though most scientists are currently skeptical when it comes to the more fantastic claims being made on Musk’s part, it can not be denied that much of what we considered to be solely in the domain of science fiction has become a science fact. Neuroprosthetics and the like are already available to patients of different paralytic issues and soon enough issues like deafness, blindness, ADHD etcetera might start being treated by tiny implants much like pacers are being used with heart patients suffering from electrical impulse issues with their hearts and arrhythmia.
In Conclusion
In a world currently facing a global pandemic, there are still people that would not want to get vaccinated once the vaccine finally arrives. On the other end, there are efforts being undertaken to ensure that humanity enters the transhuman phase of its development and possibly lead to a dystopian future while we still debate whether or not the coronavirus is real. The blatant politicization of issues like public health and education has rendered much of the population of even developed countries inept at dealing with the coronavirus.
On a more serious note, the advancement of technology along a more human level throws up a lot of moral considerations for the individual to examine as well as opens a door for security issues that need to be legislated for before it gets out of hand. Bill Gates had warned the world that it was not ready for the next epidemic five years ago. Here we have another billionaire with successful tech companies talking about something with a much larger possible impact on how we live our lives.
