Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

No one expected the battle to be so brief.

True there were the occasional tinfoil hat wearers who kept banging the drum about things like “fourth industrial revolution”, technology-driven displacement, accelerating unemployment and the like. One even ran for President. But even those who believed the challenge of technology-driven unemployment was imminent didn’t expect the ferocity and speed of the attack. Most stunning was the fact that the barrage came from a source the nature of which is unclear and which seems to straddle the distinction between living and not. It’s the thing science fiction is made of. A virus.

Exactly how did this cause the robots to win?

50 years from now, historians will view 2020 as the beginning of a disruptive socio-economic transformation. Business and society will have reformatted itself after finding humans totally unreliable as a source of labour. We will have migrated much more rapidly to automation and technology than anyone predicted. The reason has become self-evident. Machines and software are not susceptible to disruption from viruses that affect humans. The extraordinary economic cost of trying to mitigate the economic effects of this pandemic will serve as an overwhelming incentive for businesses to rely less on fragile human resources and more on non-carbon based assets.

In other words, humans have been sucker-punched.

While many of us argued that social disruption was coming because the supply/demand curve of human labour was shifting due to technology, we saw it as an accelerating slope downward. Instead what we’re now experiencing is something similar to Wile E. Coyote treading air after speeding past the edge of the cliff.

It’s interesting that the very thing that’s turned humanity on its head is something we use to describe malicious action in cyberspace. A virus. Abandoning humans for technology has its danger too. That notwithstanding, we are now living in a different world. One where traditional approaches to work and education have been blown up in a matter of weeks.

For example…

The wholesale rush by schools of all stripes to move their teaching online is the last gasp of a drowning person with no life preserver. This pandemic is only going to accelerate the crisis stemming from exploding costs, eroding return and skyrocketing student debt. Most schools will soon discover that by trying to move all their students online they have actually shot themselves in the foot. If one is attending the Intro to Macroeconomics class online, there’s no reason to do so with your current university when you can just as easily sign up for the ECON 101 class on Kahn Academy for nothing. Resources like Kahn Academy now represents the new normal and it won’t take long for students to realize it. Virtual study groups, mentoring and, once the COVID-19 epidemic has passed, local study groups that discuss, challenge and explore the concepts being learned will emerge and support the human need for connection. The incremental cost to add a student to an online class is virtually zero. If you’re a student in college right now, you know what the cost to do the same in a physical school is. Schools that become centres of excellence around emerging or specialized disciplines could become valuable players. But those who try to simply replicate the broad-based programs they had before will be quickly replaced by lower-cost alternatives. Trades, technical schools, arts and music will find a resurgence in 2 year schools and professional academies offering a much better cost/benefit calculus than conventional higher education has.

Now take that concept and spread it out across all sectors of the economy. We are about to experience the most significant and disruptive shift in social and economic systems that have ever happened and those who try to hold on to the ways of the past will be the least successful at navigating the future. It’s time to turn the concept of thinking globally and acting locally on its head. What can we do locally that the world needs globally?

Most importantly, we have to stop thinking about measuring the productive value of humans in terms of wealth and income the bulk of which is going to be increasingly produced by machines and software. All humans have an inherent value that cannot be measured in dollars, euros, bitcoins, etc.

The Robots have won. After the crisis is over, we must learn to LIVE differently.