21 Technologies for the 21st Century: Preparing for a Post-Covid Future, Part Two The New Normal

Chapter 1. The New Normal

I’m fond of the story from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, in which the narrator asks his drunk friend how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answered. “First gradually, then suddenly.” Technological and economic change happens that way too. Technologies that have been on the ascendant in a small segment of the economy burst out into the mainstream and are adopted everywhere.

This essay describes seven areas where this is happening. They are numbered starting at 7 because this is Part 2 of “21 Technologies for the 21st Century.” Technologies 1-6 can be found in Part 1.

7. The End of the Office As We Knew It

Remote work was already taking hold before the pandemic, but now, thousands of companies and millions of workers have had to learn how to do it—and they’ve found a lot to like. Zoom meeting volume jumped from 10 million daily participants at the end of last year to over 200 million daily participants in March, and 300 million in April. That’s a 30-fold increase. While this doesn’t mean that 300 million people used Zoom each day, since many people may participate in more than one daily meeting, it does mean that an order of magnitude more people are being exposed to remote work. Not only office workers but schoolteachers and students, orchestras and opera singers have had to learn how to work together without meeting face to face. Many of these people will go back to work in their offices and classrooms after the shelter-in-place orders ...