Suddenly, the future gets a whole lot closer
Society is seemingly frozen in place by the coronavirus. But really we’re speeding ever faster towards a technological future. Changes that would have occurred over the course of years are happening in weeks. The global pandemic calls to mind the famous Lenin quote: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
In the US, germ-phobic shoppers are finally embracing contactless payments. For a decade, American retailers had resisted new payment technologies that have spread across Europe and Asia. But as people worry about catching the coronavirus by handling cash or from a touchpad, systems that allow shoppers to tap their cards or smartphones on credit card terminals are grabbing a larger share of transactions. Grocery chains are speeding up the rollout of contactless terminals and the introduction of services like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
At home, the sauntering videostreaming revolution has sped to a gallop. Traffic to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime and Amazon’s Twitch gaming service has seen a huge surge, and in some cases the companies have had to reduce the quality of their videos to ease internet congestion.
In the field of medicine, apprehensive patients have embraced the once-dubious notion of a virtual doctor visit. “It’s unfortunate, but the current epidemic is pushing patients to make the leap, and it can accelerate a change in habits,” said Olivier Thierry, chief executive of Qare, a French service that offers online medical consultations. For telemedicine startups such as Sweden’s Kry, the 41 per cent week-to-week increase in online consultations outside its home base has left the industry’s 14 per cent annual growth projection in the dust.
Everywhere you look, the pace of technology use is accelerating. Facebook fatigue seems to have evaporated and social networking is up — the video chat party app Houseparty has seen 50 million signups over the last month. The use of Microsoft Teams video chat service set a daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes, and Zoom has zoomed from 10 million users to more than 200 million, despite concerns about its security. Elsewhere, the share of e-commerce and grocery deliveries to the home is increasing rapidly for the obvious reasons, further fortifying the competitive positions of Amazon and Walmart, already the world’s largest retailers.
One concern is that the increased embrace of technology will also amplify its accompanying ills. With 1.5 billion children staying at home, they’re being indulged with more screen time than ever (“parents have temporarily lost the battle,” a Paris-based psychiatrist told us last week).
The partnership between Google and Apple to embed contact-tracing features in their smartphone software raises the spectre of unchecked corporate and government surveillance — an Orwellian dystopia, but one that now seems reasonable, if it can only offer a route out of the current predicament.
So, will everything go back to normal when the pandemic fades and the lockdowns lift?
Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo thinks many of these changes, like more employees working from home, will become permanent as companies recognise the benefits of telework and the wisdom of having employees in multiple places to protect against future pandemics. In fact, he predicts that San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower will be the last significant high-rise ever built in the city, as offices finally adopt remote work technology.
“A balloon once stretched never returns to its original size,” he said.