Three weeks ago I wrote a column about how the Covid-19 crisis was likely to affect the future of tech companies and technology policy. Since then, I have spent more time considering the inverse question: How is the state of technology in 2020 playing a role in shaping our experience of, and response to, the Covid-19 pandemic?
Put differently, had the current Covid-19 incident occurred a few decades in the past or the future, how would our response to the pandemic be different? And how would its ultimate impact differ from how it is playing out today?
Here are some of the most important ways where I think our technological “adolescence” is shaping how the Covid-19 crisis is developing, and its ultimate health and economic impact.
Technology’s role in the speed of Covid-19’s spread
It seems obvious that Covid-19 has gone global at an unprecedented rate because of the first- and second-order impacts of technology on our society.
As everyone recognizes, cheap, nearly ubiquitous jet travel and the ability to live comfortably in massive cities are both direct functions of technology. In an earlier era, a highly contagious outbreak in a central Chinese city might have eventually reached the whole world, but it wouldn’t have gone global quite so quickly or completely.
In an era to come, it is conceivable that because of this episode, some of the nearly complete freedom of movement we have today will be pulled back in some form, moving us away from the risky global monoculture we have today.
Technology’s ability to provide early detection, global awareness and proper measurement
One thing we are better at today is raising the global alarm quickly when a pandemic starts. Looking at the big picture—and setting aside questions of what information was potentially suppressed early on—it is impressive that within a matter of weeks, a disease in the middle of China was being closely followed globally and work was underway to understand its virality and mortality rate.
That said, we are still far away from having the tools and platforms to get accurate answers to the key questions that inform proper response.
The challenges we face—in data integrity, testing and tracking enough people, and modeling different societies and populations—means that our estimates of the transmission rate and mortality rate of Covid-19 are extremely rough even today, months into the crisis. This is unfortunate because more-specific answers would be very helpful in modeling what to do and would galvanize a response faster. It would also help with second-degree issues like giving the financial markets a clearer picture of reality.
In the future, as we move out of technological adolescence, we hopefully will have better tools and data for modeling our response, and I hope we have them in well-designed, privacy-preserving ways. When there is a “next” crisis, hopefully we will have the useful at-scale self-reporting and testing capabilities to dramatically improve our response.
Providing logistical support for long quarantines
Stay-at-home orders today can be far more complete and can last far longer than ever before in human history because of our technological and logistical capabilities. Historically, we needed far more people to physically show up day to day to keep cities fed and functioning than we do today.
Take, for example, what happened during the Spanish flu a century ago. In that era, leaders knew the importance of social distancing, and many cities enacted measures like closing schools, churches and bars to limit the spread of the disease. But very few cities tried full stay-at-home orders. And those that did only implemented the orders for brief periods because cities needed far more people to show up at physical work to keep their communities functioning. Cities shortened business hours and made workers wear masks, but the level of social distancing we are enacting now simply wasn’t feasible historically.
Today, we can operate cities with far fewer people physically working away from their homes than ever before. Things like our highly efficient food-supply chain and robust home-delivery infrastructure are great new tools for “flattening the curve.” But they are nowhere close to perfect.
First, we still need a lot of people actively out of their homes every day working. In a few decades, with better automated production and logistics, as well as things like self-driving cars and delivery robots, we could in theory maintain far more complete quarantines than we are attempting today.
Second, while we may be able to do social distancing at scale today for a duration that was historically unimaginable, we can’t do it without the deep and very distortionary economic impact we are seeing today. It is unclear how a future of even less human intervention in logistics, and even greater abilities to reasonably quarantine people, will affect the economically lopsided impact of pandemics, where certain businesses are well set up for remote work and others are not.
Enforcing social distancing measures
Reviewing the history of epidemics, many people argue that quarantines were not necessarily a good strategy at scale because they historically have been so hard to enforce. Contrast that with steps like closing public spaces, which can be highly enforceable.
Today, we have certain tools that make it easier to enforce quarantines. Whether you think of extensive camera networks or of how the Chinese used drones to patrol areas under quarantine, the technology is there.
In the future, our ability to use technology to enforce quarantines could be nearly perfect—including in ways that preserve privacy. How you feel about the use of technology to enforce quarantines is a matter of debate. It is a powerful tool that once unlocked is hard to step back from and is rife for abuse.
Enabling work from home
For some people—especially knowledge workers—“working from home” isn’t an enormous change or inconvenience. For others, it means no longer having a job.
It is an unfortunate truth that, broadly speaking, the better off in society have an easier time conducting their normal business from home and the more vulnerable are the ones for whom working from home is not an option.
So in some sense, with the internet and advanced communication technology, we are better off dealing with quarantine today than we would have been decades ago. But in a few decades, far more jobs will be set up to be done from home seamlessly than is the case today.
In that respect, Covid-19 in 2040 would look different and have less of an impact than is the case today. It is possible that while in 2020 we are dramatically better off from a health perspective, we might be at the point in history of nearly maximal economic disruption from quarantines because the stay-at-home orders have such a dramatically different impact on different industries.
The impact on remote learning
Remote learning follows a similar pattern to working from home. If Covid-19 had happened decades ago, our entire educational apparatus would have shut down. If Covid-19 were to happen 20 years in the future, it might not have that much of an impact outside of early childhood education.
Again, as with work, it is an unfortunate quirk of reality that the future is already here but is unevenly distributed. The best-endowed institutions will have an easier time with this transition than the most in need.
Entertainment and connection
I cannot imagine enduring the quarantines we face today without access to streaming media, digital news and the whole host of internet services that keep me in touch and entertained.
Had Covid-19 happened decades ago, there is a real question about how long we could have maintained physical distancing without everyone starting to have real mental and emotional issues.
Of course, we aren’t all the way there, both because of unequal access to quality internet and lack of next-generation immersive experiences. If you believe that in the coming years more people will get complete access to broadband connections, and that things like Oculus will get much better, physical distancing might be easier than it is today.
Keeping the financial system online
Most of our finance system seems to be working just fine with remote work from home. There are no runs on banks for cash because, broadly speaking, no one is worried about accessing all their accounts, paying bills, and continuing to function remotely (there were actually cash shortages at some banks for a while in places like San Francisco, but they were not dire). The stock market is functioning fine even with most people at home.
I wonder how many years ago having people work from home would have disrupted the financial system.
Improving business flexibility
The most recent unemployment numbers, showing that 9.9 million Americans lost their jobs in response to Covid-19, are shocking. On the flip side, it is amazing to see companies like Amazon and Instacart looking for hundreds of thousands of new workers. This level of rapid employment shift is unprecedented.
The loss of jobs and wages is, of course, a tragedy. I don’t want to gloss over that point in the least. However, from a purely technological perspective, we are at an interesting new tech-enabled point in time. Businesses today have the organizational capacity to respond extremely quickly to changing environments, both hiring and releasing workers and shifting cost structures as needed faster than ever before.
With cloud utilization, for example, companies can turn tech services up or down quickly. We now clearly live in an on-demand world where businesses can flex their cost structures as they need.
The perhaps slight positive at a social level from today’s firm-labor flexibility and ability to manage costs is that several businesses that might have collapsed in the past under such stress may be able to survive this shock and live to prosper in the future.
Looking forward, had this crisis occurred 20 or 30 years into the future, the immediate job loss would very likely have been even more dramatic than what we just saw, and more businesses would have survived than will today.
That said, it also means that in the future we as a society need more government-led forms of medical, financial and social insurance, rather than relying on companies to provide that stability in times of extreme disruption. If we are going to let companies fully leverage technology to maximize their flexibility and survivability, then the country has to do a better job of picking up the tab for disruption.
Targeting and deploying financial stimulus and assistance
We face an awkward adolescence in our ability to strategically target and deploy effective stimulus and aid for people across the country.
On one hand, it is good that we were able to come together and pass large stimulus packages for individuals and businesses. It is also good that we are far enough along in our technological development that the IRS can do things like rapidly deliver cash to households via direct deposit. Not too many years ago, the sheer logistics of getting that many checks out to that many people would not have worked on any reasonable timeline. Our ability to get money to people and businesses quickly is a major reason we haven’t yet seen total economic collapse.
On the other hand, there are still massive gaps in our ability to target and deliver stimulus from the government to households and businesses rapidly. Getting cash into the hands of American households is still going to take weeks, not days or hours. Getting the allocated Small Business Administration loan dollars to small businesses will take longer, and how these loans will be delivered and tracked is still undefined. We also have to acknowledge that our systems for delivering stimulus are quite crude. In some cases, they might not cover people in need, and they certainly overfund some people and businesses that are not in need.
If something like Covid-19 happens a few decades in the future, there almost certainly will be faster options for governments to fund people and businesses in sudden need. Assuming we move toward some form of national digital identity (which we need despite privacy concerns), and that identity is rich enough and properly linked, we could more quickly and precisely target stimulus and deliver money to specific people in need. Assuming we also end up with some more-direct form of a digital dollar, we could move even faster and do things like track exactly how stimulus is deployed to prevent fraud (that tracking of course also has massive privacy challenges).
In the future, there is no question that we will be able to do more-nuanced things faster to keep people in good shape and then set up a reboot of the economy.
Distributing medical supplies and fabricating devices
Technology allows us to pivot supply chains faster today than we ever could have in the past. We can retool factories and source parts at an unimaginably faster rate today than we could have before the internet.
This gives us far more of a fighting chance to produce and access what we now urgently need than was the case a few decades ago.
That said, how much better off will we be in logistical and production flexibility in just a few years, let alone decades? You can imagine a not-too-distant future where it becomes easier for the world to know, perhaps using things like blockchains, who has what supplies and what capabilities on hand. And it becomes easier to rapidly produce urgently needed supplies.
As an example of where we are and where we are likely going, just look at what is happening with mask supply. The good news is that there is a ton of capacity to make masks being retooled and coming online quickly. The bad news is that when you get into the guts of how this retooling and logistical supply chain is coming together, it is quite ad hoc and involves a lot of back and forths and cycles to understand what is needed, who has what supplies, and what the best way is to meet needs. As has become clear, the lack of transparency and organization has led to all sorts of inefficiency.
I strongly believe in free markets. I also believe there are times for the government to step in and organize at immense scale when needed.
The internet has made our ability to quickly switch fabrication and distribution to match new needs infinitely better than it was in the past. If we had days or weeks to pull off production of the medical supplies needed today and only phones to do it, it would not happen. But my expectation is that in a few decades the systems will be in place that will allow us to move around productions and logistics more flexibly than today.
Developing new medicines
We are much better off than we would have been decades ago in terms of developing drugs and vaccines. The fact that we already have multiple promising options ready for trial probably would have seemed unfathomable just a few decades ago.
While I am no expert, the RNA-based vaccines teams like Moderna are working on are amazing, and we are lucky to have them in the fight. The problem, of course, is that while we can make a lot of progress much faster, the human testing side for efficacy and safety still takes a very long time, as does simply producing the billions of doses of vaccine that will eventually be needed.
It is worth asking whether in a few decades there will be new approaches and digital simulation tools that allow new medicines to come to market, and become broadly available, much faster.
The Glass Half Full View of Covid-19
We obviously face a completely unprecedented global medical and financial emergency. That is the first priority now for everyone. The coming weeks and months are clearly going to be very sad and very painful.
I am grateful that we are facing this crisis with the tools of 2020 and not those of 1980. It is shocking to think just how much better prepared we are to take on the enormously difficult road ahead than we would have been in the very near past. To me, with a view from 2020, doing what we are doing today 40 years ago seems like it would have been borderline impossible.
Of course, by the same logic, it would have been great if we had had another 20 to 30 years before facing something like this. In just a few decades, the natural course and speed of technology would have allowed us to be far better prepared. There is no question that what we are living through right now will increase the explicit focus on the tools we need to prevent pandemics where possible and fight the next pandemic effectively.
It is better today than it would have been in the past. And it will be better tomorrow than it is today.