Is tech making us vulnerable? Or resilient?

The number of natural disasters has risen dramatically in recent years. Part of this is better reporting, but a significant amount of it can be tied to climate change and resource scarcity—as well as the expansion of human populations into at-risk areas subject to flooding and wildfires.

(From Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters))

The good news is that the lives lost to such tragedies has dropped—thanks in part to better preparedness, improved communications, and new technologies to find and help survivors.

(From Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/04/Global-annual-death-rate-from-natural-disasters-01.png))

Is technology making us less or more vulnerable?

Many of the systems we take for granted can be co-opted into emergency services: For example, in many countries, beer and soft drink makers can quickly reconfigure their factories to produce canned water and push it down their supply chains—the systems we’ve created as a society to move goods and services at scale can be quickly transformed to help us.

The phones in our pocket can help, too. They let us check in to tell others we're safe in emergencies. Everyone now has a personal communicator, a GPS tracker, the ability to document conditions with detailed photographs, and even a flashlight. Emergency broadcast messages can warn an entire city in minutes, and Big Data can predict the path of a hurricane or model the best way to block a forest fire.

But these systems are brittle. Turning off power, even for a few hours, puts thousands of people at risk. Leave it off for a few days, and many of these tech-given superpowers are revoked.

And then bad things happen. Weaned on digital navigation, few of us have maps any more. Dependent on smartphones, we don't remember numbers—or even have landlines. Sometimes the vulnerability is more subtle: The sharing economy makes a lot of sense, because cars are parked 95% of the time—until everyone suddenly needs a car at once to escape an earthquake. When you're fleeing an emergency, you're unlikely to order an Uber Pool.

As we tackle a world where emergencies are the new norm, we need to put tech to work—without becoming dependent on it. Striking a balance between public-sector assistance and citizen resiliency is critical if we're to survive the coming years of crises and uncertainty. It's one of the big topics we're tackling at FWD50 in Ottawa this November, because it affects every facet of both tech and government.

Want to learn more? Check out this post on the climate, disaster, and emergencies workshop we're running, as well as some of the other things happening during Canada's digital government week November 5-7.