15-March-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper
Agents of Change
Updated: Added section on 3D Printing on 24-Mar-2020
Society has been undergoing a transformation for the past 20 years due to the introduction of high speed internet to the masses. New uses have come into play, each introducing a sea change to a particular aspect of our lives. Along the way, particular events happen that act as Agents of Change, speeding up the transformation in one or many different areas at the same time. Some changes are inflection points, where you can point to a single cause for dramatic change. 9/11 was such a point. The current COVID-19 pandemic may very well likely be another such inflection point.
Twenty years ago, vast amounts of information were coming online, allowing anyone to learn anything about nearly everything. The ability to spread news and ideas without borders, held initial promise and resulted in major leaps and gains in technology and usage of the internet itself. Creativity began having a heyday. The advent of social media, while at first connecting families and friends, and helping people find like-minded new friends around the world, was another big jump.
No matter what good, initially, technological leaps bring, in time, bad actors will also enter the fray. Social media itself greatly amplified Group Think, caused by what I call a “Similarity Engine”, the likely topic of a future article. If that wasn’t bad enough, others then took advantage of that. The result is today we have a very polarized society, and it can be difficult to tell good information from bad.
White much good has come from massively interconnecting out world, it will take some time to deal with this double-edged sword. Just like expansion out West in the 19th century in the US opened up vast new resources and wealth, it also suffered from lawlessness.
The current COVID-19 outbreak is radically, if (hopefully) temporarily, forcing us to retreat from our normal, publicly intertwined lives into forced lonerism for the time being. We’re lucky to have the infrastructure we have, because it allows us to move online to take care of many aspects of our daily lives. I’ll go through some obvious ones that will be in heavy use, and how this crisis may impact them in the long term.
Working From Home
Many people do not have the option to work from home. For those who are able to, at least for now, working from home is in vogue again out of necessity. While it was trending for years, the CEO of Yahoo famously forbid employees from working at home in 2013. This seemed to spark a trend to revoke the privilege at many companies. The pendulum may now swing back and stay there for a while. With modern tools like Slack, it has gotten easier to be distributed.
Measuring productivity is more challenging, but with properly set goals to be measured, it’s achievable. There is another frequently cited reason for calling workers back to the office, which is to increase team interaction. This may be overblown. I think team get togethers are essential to build camaraderie and foster a good, interworking relationships. However, I think management practices themselves need to adapt to this working model, rather than trying to force teams to continue to always come into the office. I am at my creative best when I’m alone. At some intervals, it is good to vet ideas through colleagues, but every day is not necessary in most situations. There are firms now that are successfully distributed. Larger companies need to adopt those management processes.
Education
Education has benefited enormously from the internet. Students can research more effectively as the entirety of human knowledge is largely accessible online. There are challenges with this due to misinformation and mistakes, not to mention plagiarism. But after some lag, there are tools to help address this.
Online education will likely become more viable and common in colleges and universities. In K-12, during this outbreak, it will prove bumpy due to uneven access particularly among disadvantaged youth and rural, low-bandwidth areas. I’m hoping this spurs programs to fix that, to enable access for everyone, which will benefit not just during the rare outbreak, but everyday learning and access to information (just keep them off social media…).
Partly to fix this infrastructure will need upgrading (see below). Also needed will be programs to ensure that every child has access to the learning portal, and measures will need to be taken in those circumstances where disadvantaged children are in homes that are unfortunately not conducive to learning, be it from overcrowded homes to dysfunctional family dynamics. I’m not a social worker, but it will be through these channels communicating with the schools that work to address that limitation.
Retail
Retail has been migrating online for years and is quite advanced already, with many people shopping largely online. Some malls have innovated, becoming destinations to add value and fun to making the trip back to the stores. This may well accelerate as even more people try out more online outlets and choose to stick with them out of convenience when this is over.
I do think that the online shopping experience needs to get a lot better. Figuring out how to better allow for ordering fitted clothing would improve margins. AI for more intelligent recommendation would similarly improve margins as well. My wife orders half a dozen pairs of shoes, and returns 5 of them after trying them on. This is not efficient, but is tolerated by the e-tailers in order to be able to offer anything you want to buy.
A growing subset of this space is grocery stores and restaurants. During this outbreak, grocery and restaurant delivery will spike as people don’t want to crowd into stores and restaurants. Once people, many who have never tried these services before, are exposed to them, the retention rate will create a net increase in the use of these services in the long run.
Healthcare
During the crisis, there is the real threat of healthcare systems becoming overloaded. The best way to deal with this (aside from emergency government interventions to set up temporary hospitals, for example) will be for non-critical needs to be addressed remotely, if possible. This will result in fewer people being exposed to those who are sickest. Through the use of online medical services those with non-critical symptoms or other maladies may be able to be remotely diagnosed, with prescriptions that can be delivered, if needed.
Virtual follow-up care will also facilitate the load and improve the throughput of the existing system. Similar to grocery and food delivery, once used, the retention rate for simpler maladies will be much higher. The higher volume of usage during this crisis will also help these services find and fix issues, and may drive even more innovation in this space.
Conferences
One of the first casualties of the COVID-19 outbreak was the cancellation of large conferences, and then the rapid trickle-down to smaller ones. Some conferences are postponed, but the bigger ones don’t always have that option due to venue availability. While this is still playing out, some may choose to “virtualize” the event to the extent that makes sense.
Sessions, for example, can be moved online and held via webinars. Potentially the audience will actually be bigger. However, I see virtualization of the tradeshow floor being more difficult to replicate. We are already very well connected online, can see a company’s products, watch videos, but you don’t get the casual exposure you get at a real tradeshow. It’s not infrequent that people get great ideas from something they didn’t expect to see or a chance interaction at the event. Online searching tends to be to find what you are looking for.
I see conference virtualization as a way to mitigate some of this year’s losses, but it will be hard to recoup. Webinars cost money, and tradeshows frequently make up a large chunk of a trade organization’s budget. I also don’t see VR-based virtual conferences, as I am not yet sold on the idea that VR is all that useful outside of niche markets (and medicine).
There may well be some innovative ideas to help mitigate this year that will help tradeshows develop a 365-day-a-year supplementary offering. I see it hard in the near future to replace the actual tradeshow any more than it is to replace live concerts with virtual ones.
3D Printing
(Note: added after initial publication.) Another area that will innovate rapidly is 3D Printing. It has come a long way in 10 years. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with medical supply shortages looming, a group of 3D printers banded together to help out by printing some sorely needed supplies. In the future, building out a more robust, customizable on-demand manufacturing capability. Incremental fabrication by 3D printers will revolutionize manufacturing in a crisis. Retooling will be as easy as loading the right models and raw material to produce it.
IoT and Payments
While IoT is rapidly developing and contactless payments are becoming more widespread, they are very useful during a pandemic outbreak. I bought groceries today, and was happy to be able to use Apple Pay and not have to touch the terminal at checkout.
Similarly, my approach to IoT and responsive environments, by definition, is contact-free. My concepts involve the environment responding to you automatically, and not you having to manipulate the environment. The less things you touch in a public space, the fewer opportunities for germs to spread.
Communications Infrastructure
With so many people staying home right now, the need for bandwidth at home is increasing. ISP’s and carriers are under pressure to increase or remove data caps during this crisis. It remains to be seen if this will revert fully to normal or we see a longer-term relaxation in these restrictions.
Another issue is US bandwidth is low compared to much of the world. Lack of competition has resulted in underinvestment and little motivation to increase them. Rural internet access is dismal. Satellite systems are, for now, slow compared to cities. Upload speeds on such systems are a fraction of download speeds. Planned constellations should improve this dramatically, but are still a few years away from broad coverage.
Perhaps once satellite options are available, urban ISP’s may even feel pressure to finally upgrade their bandwidth. Any that strain during the COVID-19 crisis will be under pressure to fix their system so that their customers don’t face these limitations again in the future.
Truth Telling
With all the information and misinformation out there, the ability to identify real and false information is critical. It must be trusted and nearly bullet-proof. Just like real viruses and bacteria that mutate to get around protections, threats will mutate and shift to get around security and fact-checking measures. Fact-checking will need to be automated as much as possible, because the volume is too high to deal with. The internet has a long memory, and once a bad or dangerous piece of information is out there, it can stick around for a very long time.
Deep Fakes are of special concern, because it is becoming possible to make anyone say anything. Soon they’ll be able to make anyone appear to do anything. Detecting the authenticity of audio and video footage is essential. It will be an arms race, however, as authentication systems themselves are hacked and ever-more-complicated ones emerge to replace them.
Automation
Lastly, let’s talk about automation. I see automation, already long underway, marching at an accelerated pace. This alone will likely wreak the largest changes on society in the short term due to short term loss of jobs and long term need to shift the labor force to new industries.
The past few years trade wars were put in place to ostensibly drive employment back to the US. With the exception of a few, more visible hiring sprees, I don’t see this being successful. Manufacturing many products in our country is simply more expensive and consumers, no matter how idealistic, will seek out the lower prices, without fault. With tariffs in place, widespread US-based manufacturing is only viable with automation. Trade wars are accelerating this.
Enter COVID-19. There are several parameters of the virus that are not fully measured yet will determine how this plays out, Darker scenarios with many people sick and a higher mortality rate may strain the underlying elements that keep us running as a society. Food production, processing, shipping, warehousing, stocking, selling and during the crisis, delivery, all depend on people. It too many people get sick, it will start to disrupt the food supply. Reducing dependence on people will help mitigate this, but simultaneously disrupt labor.
It is similar with utilities. There need to be people to run the power and communication grids, and repair them if they are damaged or go offline. While it’s hard to automate fixing a remote powerline, for now, the grid badly needs a major overhaul and added redundancy.
Going back to healthcare, hospitals need people to staff them, and with the sickest people in those hospitals, the health care workers are at the greatest risk. If healthcare workers get sick en masse, the crisis will escalate even more quickly. Reducing patient interaction via robotics could reduce the spread. Innovation will also occur in advancing anti-microbial surfaces, where viruses, bacteria and fungus can’t survive.
Materials Science
Speaking of anti-microbial surfaces, this is another area of innovation. Not all technological advances have to be related to computing. While coating hospital surfaces in these materials is the first and most obvious use, it needs to advance to find both better materials and to drive down the manufacturing cost to coat more common objects in public that people touch frequently.
If the costs of these coatings come down enough, they can be used across industries that involve common touch points, which currently are a vector in the spread of colds and flu. Think door handles at stores and businesses and the checkout line at the grocery store. Doctor’s office, ATM machines, gym equipment, public and business restrooms, restaurants would all benefit from low-cost solutions reducing the spread of germs. While social distancing is an important and perhaps the biggest step in stemming COVID-19’s spread, decontaminating surfaces aren’t far behind. The follow-on benefits of such surfaces will also reduce future spread of colds and the annually deadly influenza.
Cyber Future
The stresses our systems are about to undergo, in the long term, will result in better systems. Failures and increased casualties will lay bare the limitations of today’s technology and processes. What will emerge will be a blend of much-improved access, new health-care options, new business models, and brand new technologies.
With robust systems better able to cope with an isolated, massively online public, social distancing will be easier and the peak of the pandemic can be delayed, depicted in the graphic at the top of the article.
The changes wrought upon society will be there, too. The current polarization will make dealing with those difficult. If we can eventually get past that, hopefully society will improve as a result. But the sword of change can cut both ways. We are in for a ride. Let’s work for the best.
These are my opinions, naturally. I would love to hear from you. None of us has a Magic 8-ball to the future, but informed insight is welcome. The exchange of ideas, good at any time, is crucial in such circumstances.
COMMENTS
This is a very topical comment in this extraordinary time. And I believe this is certainly an inflection point that is already forcing great changes in our lives. You’ve certainly identified particular areas affected, how they are affected, and what internet-based solutions may be applied or improved to help both sooner and later.