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https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html It's the year 2042. You're seeing reports in the media about a new pandemic potentially in your city. You're used to these: people get over-excited about every animal disease mutation, and most of them come to nothing. The previous two actual potential pandemics were detected very early through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media, and stopped completely in their tracks. But this time, prediction markets are showing a 60% chance of at least 10,000 cases, so you're more worried. The sequence for the virus was identified yesterday. Software updates for your pocket air tester to allow it to detect the new virus (from a single breath, or from 15 minutes of exposure to indoor air in a room) are available already. Open-source instructions and code for generating a vaccine using equipment that can be found in any modern medical facility worldwide should be available within weeks. Most people are not yet taking any action at all, relying mostly on widespread adoption of air filtering and ventilation to protect them. You have an immune condition so you're more cautious: your open-source locally-running personal assistant AI, which handles among other tasks navigation and restaurant and event recommendation, is also taking into account real-time air tester and CO2 data to only recommend the safest venues. The data is provided by many thousands of participants and devices using ZK-SNARKs and differential privacy to minimize the risk that the data can be leaked or abused for any other purpose (if you want to contribute data to these datasets, there's other personal assistant AIs that verify formal proofs that these cryptographic gadgets actually work). Two months later, the pandemic disappeared: it seems like 60% of people following the basic protocol of putting on a mask if the air tester beeps and shows the virus present, and staying home if they test positive personally, was enough to push the transmission rate, already heavily reduced due to passive heavy air filtering, to below 1. A disease that simulations show might have been five times worse than Covid twenty years ago turns out to be a non-issue today.