Herd immunity as an unconscious metaphor for groupthink

Governance of Pandemic Response by Artificial Intelligence (Part #8)

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | Refs ]

---

Consensual surrogacy? It has been emphatically stressed by world leaders that universal vaccination is essential to achieving herd immunity. The analogous distinctions in other countries have added to arguments regarding the inequalities engendered by the pandemic and access to vaccines, exemplified by the declarations of the UN Secretary-General (Guterres: Vaccines should be considered 'global public goods', UN News, 11 June 2021):

"We are at war" with the coronavirus, he said, that continues to cause "tremendous suffering" and destroy the global economy. To defeat the virus, we must "boost our weapons", he added, calling for a "global vaccination plan".

As previously argued, the United Nations has been frustrated over decades in its inability to achieve effective global consensus on the implementation of strategies in response to the range of global crises -- exemplified by those framed by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals as a global "dream" (Systemic Coherence of the UN's 17 SDGs as a Global Dream, 2021). This frustration is echoed historically by that of other collective "dreams": Christianity, Communism, Socialism, and the like.

The current global consensus on the desirability of universal vaccination can therefore be recognized as the closest that humanity has come to achieving the kind of consensus sought by those initiatives of the past. Given that many can be said to have been articulated as a surrogate for the quest of the world's monotheistic religions for universal belief in a particular deity, universal vaccination can be explored in that light.

Groupthink? A relevant question is the extent to which the quest for herd immunity is effectively a surrogate for the form of groupthimk implied by those other initiatives. Otherwise understood, is herd immunity a metaphor for a collective process implied by groupthink? A difficulty highlighted from a secular perspective is the delusion identified in the religious case by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006). This critique can however be extended to the delusion regarding global consensus -- as "consensus" and "global" are currently understood (The Consensus Delusion: mysterious attractor undermining global civilization as currently imagined, 2011).

How would a sophisticated AI enable the framing of a consensual global reality? Would it build in the recognition of enemies upholding seemingly opposing realities -- achiving a form of dynamic integration? Would those variously upholding such disparate realities have any capacity to recognize the "invisible hand" of its operations?

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | Refs ]