New World Same Humans #2
Notes on an epidemic. In search of the Zeroth Law. What Goop Lab tells us about modern life.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a new weekly newsletter by TrendWatching’s Global Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin.
This week I thought about virus outbreaks, existential risk, energy exorcisms and modernity.
Let’s do this.
Notes on an Epidemic
At the time of writing there are over 14,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and 304 confirmed deaths. It’s thought that 2019-nCoV jumped from animals to humans in a seafood market in Wuhan; human infection has now been reported in at least 16 other countries, including Japan, Australia, Canada and Germany.
For those old enough to remember it, the SARS outbreak of 2002 comes to mind. And part of what’s notable about news around the Wuhan virus is how it highlights many of the trends and innovations that have changed the world since SARS.
An AI epidemiological tool helped give early warning of the outbreak. US Republicans are using the virus as a lever to promote US industry over Chinese. Meanwhile, some Chinese villages are deploying drones to police the behaviour of their inhabitants; see his bemused senior citizen being…
