A century ago the Spanish flu confounded scientists and devastated whole regions, but while today's society has air travel and an enormous, heterogeneous population, we also have antibiotics, fantastic communication networks and, perhaps most crucially, more data than ever.
We literally hand over our most private data, our DNA, but we're not just consenting for ourselves, we are consenting for our children, and our children's children. Maybe we don't live in a world where people are genetically discriminated against now, but who's to say in 100 years that we won't?
Curating our data is valuable. Like 23andMe - while selling us the chance to know whether we're Vikings or whatever, they're amassing these huge DNA databases that are unimaginably valuable. Get people to pay you to add their DNA to this database. Genius!
In our urge to automate, in our eagerness to adopt the latest innovations, we appear to have developed a habit of unthinkingly handing over power to machines.
Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn't be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis.
As the law catches up and the battle between corporate profits and social good plays out, we need to be careful not to be lulled into a false sense of privacy.
Every criminal-justice system has to find some kind of balance between protecting the rights of innocent people falsely accused of crimes and protecting the victims of crimes.
I'm an academic. I did my PhD in fluid dynamics and now I work at the University College London in an interdisciplinary department looking at patterns of human behaviour in urban settings.
And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it.
You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose. And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances.
The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines and satellite navigation to music recommendation systems.
I'm writing a book called 'The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus' about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it's totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly.
Every time you shop online, every time you sign up for a newsletter, or register on a website, or enquire about a new car, or fill out a warranty card, or buy a new home, or register to vote - you are unwittingly handing over a small clue as to who you are and how you behave.
In every community, there are a number of 'social super-spreaders' among us. Long-suspected and emphatically confirmed by our data, these are people who - through dint of their job, or lifestyle, or perhaps even genetic makeup - would be more dangerous in the instance of a pandemic than the average person.
I certainly think there are some skills we'll lose as we hand things over to automation. I can barely remember my own phone number now, let alone the long list of numbers I used to know, and my handwriting has completely gone to pot.
On average, the higher the novelty score a film had, the better it did at the box office. But only up to a point. Push past that novelty threshold, and there's a precipice; the revenue earned by a film fell off a cliff.
History is littered with examples of objects and inventions with a power beyond their professed purpose. Sometimes it's deliberately and maliciously factored into their design, but at other times, it's a result of thoughtless omissions.
All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority: an easy way to delegate responsibility, a short cut we take without thinking.
No weather forecaster can tell you for sure when to wear a rain slicker, stock up on canned goods, or evacuate a city that's in a cyclone's path. All forecasters can offer is their best guess at the atmosphere of the future, whispered by the simulated blue marble and wrapped up in uncertainty.
But the threat of a pandemic is different from that of a nerve agent, in that a disease can spread uncontrollably, long after the first carrier has succumbed.
