One of the great Angry Harry’s biggest predictions, and the one he was perhaps most certain of, was that before too long, the world would have to get used to regular pandemics, and this was something that would completely transform society.
The consequences of even just one virus attack will be horrible, and one result will be that governments everywhere will try to clamp down very heavily indeed – on just about everything.
As just one example, your actual body will need to be checked wherever you go – e.g. at airports – to ensure that you are not carrying some virus within you.
And life will not be too pleasant when people are too scared to send their children to school, too scared to go out to work, too scared to go shopping, and even too scared to leave their homes; lest they end up infected.
Our societies will collapse wholesale.
What people can do with computer viruses today, they will probably be able to do with biological viruses tomorrow.
Millions of us will die.
All of us will be terrified.
This is the likely future for you and for those whom you purport to love.
True, Angry Harry wasn’t talking about pandemics caused by (apparently) dodgy bat meat bought at a Chinese wet market. He was making a prediction that it was inevitable that sooner or later, it will be as easy for some kid in his bedroom to make something like the Chinese virus and unleash it upon the world, as it is currently to make a computer virus that spreads.
Angry Harry was wrong in his time-scale. He first made this prediction as early as 2003 and claimed it was only 5 years away or so.
Like most great futurists, Angry Harry overestimated the speed that technology would arrive, but his point still stands. It’s only a matter of time before we live in such a world in which virtually every individual on the planet has the potential to cause the kind of chaos we’re witnessing today.
This idea was one of Harry’s most controversial (by his own admission). Not the idea or prediction itself, but Harry’s proposed solution – giving government vast new powers to snoop and monitor its citizens. This obviously didn’t go down too well with a lot of his libertarian minded fans. But to be fair, as you would expect, Angry Harry wasn’t simply proposing a Big Brother nightmarish society in response to the threat of man-made virus pandemics. He was rather suggesting it was inevitable and calling for the need to make such monitoring as transparent and honest as possible, as well as preventing what will likely be the major source of such viral attacks – the continued alienation of young males in society.
http://www.angryharry.com/esEightHorribleFacts.htm