Political economist Orit Gal points out: "complexity theory teaches us that major events are the manifestation of maturing and converging underlying trends: they reflect change that has already occurred within the system."
This means going 'back to normal' is a mistake. As is failing to become more responsive.
I have detailed two of these trends in distributed working, and the responsive organisation (and it can be argued distributed working is nested in and part of the trend towards the responsive organisation).
I have also documented the trend towards treating our planet as a partner, in the way we have become good at treating our customers with respect - in the concept of Planet Experience.
There are, naturally, others. The trend towards a cashless society, for example, away from traditional education (by subject and as a mass production model), for another.
I want to raise some questions about the acceleration of a significant and immediate additional trend today, because its second and third order consequences will have extreme impact on our economic model: Automation.
As companies survey the challenges facing them over the next 12-18 months they will seek to cut costs both by scaling back on their office needs (distributed working) but also by automating everything they can. If any aspect of your job can be automated and the business you are working for is looking to survive, what it will spend on, is in ways of saving money. And it's undeniable that bots usually look like a short term win in this respect.
We can argue about the harm caused by the loss of smarts from carving people out of a business. The brighter organisations will use bots to lift and shift the bits of people's working lives that don't require creativity and imagination - so that that the people are free to create value by being more creative and imaginative. But that's looking on the bright side.
We are in a darkened world of raised drawbridges, of panic and protectionism. Fear will drive many, many struggling businesses to simply take the savings and worry about the consequences later.
Those consequences will include large scale unemployment. And for many people, pivoting to being an RPA expert (for example) will, realistically, be out of reach.
What this leads us to is the acceleration of a further underlying trend - perhaps towards some version of the Universal Basic Income. Covid-19 has given us an accelerated glimpse of that future through schemes such as the UK Government's Furlough policy. Touted as a job retention scheme on the assumption things get better again fast, coupled with the lock-down experience, it may prove a leading indicator of life after large scale automation. A taste of things to come.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with bots taking peoples jobs. The challenges are in how we judge what constitutes a positive contribution to the society we live in and the ecosystem on which we rely.
If you enjoy time in the sun, exercising, learning, baking, creating art, music, craft, and in time, spending time with friends and family - doing the things you 'enjoy' more of the time than the things that are recognised as making an economic contribution (ie working), then perhaps we should formally value the enjoyable stuff as highly as we do the 'economically valuable' stuff.
But how? How do we get paid if the bots are doing our jobs?
Stephen Hawkins last message on the web gave us a clue. He said the problem wasn't the bots, it was capitalism - at least the form of market-first capitalism dominant today. Bots are bad if they mean the economic value they create /displace comes back to fewer and fewer owners of this new means of production. Bots are fine if the value they create is more equally distributed to the benefit of both society and planet.
Taxing bots has been suggested to tackle this in the short term, with the tax raised being available to spend on positive interventions for society. Which could include a Universal Basic Income and investment in a happier, healthier society and planet.
This trend demands something important of us - our understanding of our own value, and of what we call success. We will need to start prioritising happiness over stores of wealth.
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