Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

As a Taipei resident, I began in May to watch the Central Epidemic Command Center’s (CECC) news briefing every day, and I have also followed the Taipei City Government’s news conferences.

In my former career, I worked in media, where I learned that news conferences must have a specific goal. Pandemic briefings must provide timely, adequate information and clearly explain the measures implemented by health officials so that the public can understand the virus, as well as the measures’ purpose and details. The briefings should help the public to understand the virus and cooperate with disease prevention measures.

Over the past few years, inexpensive data storage coupled with advancements in supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI) analytics have allowed the exploitation of population data in ways that megalomaniac technocrats and totalitarian dictators could only have dreamed of just a decade or two ago.

US government advisers in March said that Chinese firm BGI Group was constructing a vast bank of genomic data that, combined with AI tools, would allow China to monopolize the global pharmaceutical industry, “build” genetically enhanced soldiers and — most concerning of all — engineer pathogens to empower ethnically targeted bioweapons.