Entering a new world

There have been various articles comparing COVID-19 to other causes of death. Data from the World Health Organization shows that 1.6 million deaths were directly caused by diabetes in 2016, while an average of 1.35 million people die every year due to road traffic crashes. Meanwhile, more than 120,000 deaths due to COVID-19 so far. But there is a difference: the fear of the unknown. The coronavirus is too easy to catch, and there’s no cure. It’s that incurable, easily caught, rapid spread that scares, and the fear that it could escalate to those numbers.Country after country has gone into some form of isolation or shutdown, the economy be damned. When we look back, that’s where the real damage will lie. Economies have been decimated. What’s worse, so have the people. Millions have been thrown out of jobs and many may never get them back. Poverty has won this fight.

We are heading into a radically new world. A vaccine and a cure will be discovered, and possibly within this year be on the market. The fear will subside, we’ll go back to leading our social lives. Businesses will recover, but they’ll both be different.

We are entering a radically new world. A world where the virtual will replace the physical, where online shopping will replace getting it yourself. That is already happening, as the 35-percent growth of spending on Amazon over the past month has shown. The download of the Walmart grocery app has increased some 460 percent as of April 5 compared to downloads in January. Both Amazon and Walmart have hired an additional 250,000 workers over the past few weeks, while others who service the physical world are laying off hundreds of thousands.

In the Philippines, we are also seeing the popularity of apps such as GrabFood, FoodPanda, MetroMart, Angkas, LalaFood, and other delivery apps. You may now order medicines, fresh fruits, and vegetables using these apps. This is a permanent shift. The close socializing Filipinos love won’t happen for quite some time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots were already beginning to transform business. COVID-19 will deepen and hasten that transformation. What COVID-19 has shown us is that we don’t have to be together to work together. A huge central office will become a thing of the past. Telecommuting will be more popular moving forward; even some BPOs have started to adopt work-from-home (WFH) arrangements with a portion of their employees.

What truly scares me is not COVID-19, it’s AI and robots; the pandemic has only accelerated the shift. We blithely talk about retraining people who lose their jobs to robots, but the bulk of those people are not retrainable. They’re in manual labor because they don’t have the intellect or education to be in anything else. Robots are going to do their job, so what job will there be left?

In the Philippines, many of the unemployables in an IT world could transition to agriculture. We need farmers. The Philippines could be a source of many profitable crops if it turned its mind to it.

This, I think, is the real challenge to the world. Populations are growing, but available jobs are shrinking. It’s not just manual labor, it’s the thinking jobs, too. We no longer need millions of lawyers researching previous cases for arguments to use in court. AI can do it in seconds. We’ll no longer need to call Samsung when our TV breaks down, the TV will make the call, and interface directly for the remedy.

The world is heading into a recession where the realignment of businesses will be intense. Possibly the worst-hit will be tourism. Singapore is closing Terminal 2 of Changi for 18 months—this indicates they think it will take that long before the sector recovers. Australia has closed its borders until year end. Airlines are on the brink of bankruptcy, their resurrection only possible through government largesse. But should governments save them? With limited funds, is this a priority? For some airlines, it may well not be.

What we will see is the growing power of the IT companies as they take over the smaller ones who’ve suffered under COVID-19 and with insufficient funds to have tided them over and get back on their feet. This will lead to more intrusion into our lives that governments will be powerless to prevent, or may even encourage for their own nefarious purposes. The days of privacy are over.

We’re all struggling in the dark here, struggling to understand the world we’re moving into, and how we can continue to maintain a decent life in it. Whatever it will be, it will be different.

Email: wallace_likeitis@wbf.ph