As I write this the United States is in the middle of a national quarantine for the COVID-19, and so far my own experience with the disease is extraordinarily average. Along with most people sheltering in place, I have not shown any symptoms but also have not been tested for either the virus or antibodies. The tools exist to manage this disease but on a national scale, they have not been used well. This failure to better prepare is a human failure, not a failure of our science and technology. As one example, labs have equipment to do testing but are lacking the supplies to process the tests, or in some cases even collect samples. There was an absence of planning, preparation, and response in the early days of the pandemic. How is it that we can build technology but not be prepared to use it?

Our relationship with technology is very complex. Though we create technology we also fear it, as reflected in so much of our past and present science fantasy. Stories abound of technology run amok, whether in the form of an AI takeover or nuclear disaster or zombie apocalypse or other spectacular catastrophe. At the same time, technology delivers these stories faster and more powerfully than ever before, streaming CGI created video at megabit or even gigabit speeds across the Internet. We love these stories and consume them voraciously, using technology to process our fears and fantasies about technology. From the perspective of our human love-fear relationship with technology, it's possible to understand how we could fail to have the supplies needed to operate our high tech testing machines, It is not the whole story, though.

We are still adapting our cultures to the changes in technology that started in the middle of the 19th century. Old ideas of leadership persist, allowing a pandemic to take hold. Human cities have never before had the size populations that they have today, populations only made possible by the technologies of water purification and sewage treatment, along with medicine, materials science, transportation and energy. Leadership, though, often trails the technology. The great danger to our health and economy that a pandemic represents is easy to ignore by leaders that are more interested in short term glory and prestige than the productive stability of society.

Technologies reduced common disease and allowed for the explosive population growth of the twentieth century. As an unintended consequence, the risk of a novel disease causing widespread damage grew. We saw this happen in the 1918 pandemic, where new and rapid transportation spread the disease widely and quickly. Leadership at the time often suppressed the information needed to fight the pandemic with resulting high death tolls. Even with this knowledge, many current leaders around the world have tried to suppress information about COVID-19, until the data showed the truth of the danger. Even in the face of the data, some leaders still deny the facts.

That's not to say that all leaders have failed as badly as those that deny or underplay the dangers. Local leaders in places such as San Francisco and New York have used science to manage the outbreak as well as they can without national organization, flattening the curve in their jurisdictions. What can we learn from the different approaches to leadership?

Collaboration between health officials was key to the response in the Bay Area. This type of collaboration is common in many technical fields, where standards are vital for daily operations. Once familiar with working collaboratively in routine matters, working together in an emergency becomes easier. However, political leaders used to negotiating for power are not well suited to the sort of collaborative work needed to overcome a threat such as a pandemic. Wise political leaders listen to the technical teams, while poor leaders ignore or even contradict them. As our society continues to develop technologically and populations continues to urbanize we will have no choice but to develop more collaborative forms of leadership. Old political ideas are not well suited to meeting the threats of an advanced society, which we are already seeing in the high fatality rates in the United States. In contrast to the old political ideas, collaborative organizations at all levels have generally been ahead of the pandemic, issuing warnings while there was still time to take action. If we are to avoid future pandemics, the voice of collaborative organizations must be elevated.

Collaborative organizations also provide a remedy against false or incomplete information. When knowledge is developed collaboratively, a much wider range of possibilities is considered, creating a better result than any individual would have provided on their own. Poor quality or incorrect information is weeded out through the collaborative process, ideally through compromise but as a last resort through voting. Though it does not grab headlines, this sort of collaborative work means that every aspect of our modern society functions as well as possible, from the quality of the steel in your razor to the complex protocols that deliver our streaming video.

Unfortunately, that streaming data also delivers deliberately false information. So far we have not developed a remedy for this, and this is one place where hard science fiction can help. Some of the technologies we use today were imagined in the science fiction through the middle of the twentieth century. It is now up to science fiction to imagine new forms of government and new legal structures that are suited to an advanced society. Imagining these "soft" innovations and developing them in literature will lead society to solutions to problems such as Internet trolls just as imagining geosynchronous telecommunication satellites led to technologies such as GPS.

In Without Gravity this appears in the concept of the Public Trust, where all adults are expected to behave in a responsible manner through the comm network and people with greater responsibility in society are held to a higher standard. Whether this exact system becomes a reality only time will tell, but for an advanced society to exist something similar will have to happen. We see today how the lack of a system like this is damaging our response to COVID-19, with doctors reporting that the unrestrained cruelty of internet trolls is second only to the loss of patients as an emotional burden caused by the crisis. Our society must evolve new ideas of the public square.

An evolved concept of the public square is also part of the discussion science fiction should be having. Our current laws are based on a long gone time, when the public square was literally the town square and people had to interact face to face. People say things using remote communication that they would never say in person, but our legal structure is still based in a time when people drove horse buggies to meet. The ability to broadcast cruel falsehoods to anonymous millions requires a different legal system than the one that worked when an audience of dozens could directly face a speaker. Science fiction can and should imagine different ways the public square will appear in the future. I don't believe it will be a dystopian, authoritarian, public square where narrow rules harshly punish infractions. We have evolved past tarring and feathering, at least in a physical sense, but what will the connected future look like?

There is no going back. COVID-19 will change the way we live our lives, and the story we write of the future does not need to be one of fear, it does not need to be a zombie apocalypse. We have examples of collaborative systems that work, and we can through science fiction imagine even better ways to live in a complex, advanced, technological society. Our current systems have failed us, but we can do better. We can live in a world where planning has provided enough testing materials and PPE, and our leadership effectively manages a crisis. Science fiction allows us to test the ideas that will make a better society.  We need to take the best of those ideas and make them real. We must imagine a better world, then make it happen.