Tag: John Stuart Mill

In a recent hearing on vaccines, Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., admitted the medical value of vaccines but added, "I still do not favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security." What Paul — a part-time ophthalmologist but full-time libertarian crank — calls "a false sense of security" is technically known as herd immunity. Achieving that level — 93 to 95 percent for measles — not only protects the health of a community, it protects those who really can't be vaccinated for medical reasons such as immune system problems or infants to whom the measles vaccine is not given until later. He is applying standards of political philosophy to a scientific field. Paul is making a category error in the other direction. And public health is the application of this discipline to a community of human beings. Given the nature of the measles virus, 93 to 95 percent of a human population needs to be covered for a community to be protected. Politics does make a huge difference to public health in one way. When politicians give legitimacy to dangerous and disproven scientific theories — as both Paul and President Trump have done on vaccinations — they are encouraging a lower level of coverage, which makes a higher level of compulsion necessary. So it is the vaccination skeptics who are making intrusive public health methods more likely.

The two are merging, and as they come together, companies and states will have the power to control our perceptions. The fragmentation social media promotes has been discussed to death. If virtual monopolies are to be tamed, their algorithms cannot be treated as commercially confidential when they order how debates are conducted and information is received. Already most CVs are never seen by human eyes. Those who do the monitoring wield enormous power: a power that is increasingly hard to contest. And here lies a distinctly modern arbitrariness: no one can say why. As China is already suggesting, the new technologies are giving the state powers the dictators of the past could only dream of. As a working principle it ought to be a given that any form of artificial intelligence that can harm the public must be publicly accountable. The great debate of the 21st century will be how much should be directed and controlled by digital systems. It is a tribute to him that his work makes that future a little less likely.