Peter Cochrane: We can change fast if the threat is big enough

For over 40 years I have attended conferences, seminars, and consumer shows, where the advantages of video conferencing, remote working, education online, and tele-medicine have been promoted.

Presentations and demonstrations have always been interesting and generally supported by case studies. However, the technophobes, naysayers and sceptics always seem to have the loudest voices and the most to say. To be brutally honest, there was little chance of any radical change no matter how dramatic and exciting the VR, AR, AI and big screen conferencing.

And so for decades, change in the workplace tended to be glacial, influenced only by the progress of the PC and mobile phone.

Then along came Covid and the chaos of lockdowns, and in just two weeks everyone knew what Zoom, Teams and Skype were and how powerful they could be in bridging space and time.

Even more remarkable, social networks and online retail were suddenly accepted by the most retarded of technophobes. As a result, more social change occurred in those first two weeks than in previous decades. And it has stayed that way for over two years with many components seemingly here to stay.

Our social norms now include home working, virtual education, medicine, retail, trading and support services. In turn, this has seen vastly reduced footfall in cities and towns, empty offices and underused public transport systems.

So the big question is: will all this be permanent, linger on a while, or will it eventually revert to the pre-Covid state?

I suspect that the answer is: there will be a degree of permanence. Counter to established wisdom, people who work from home are more productive and generally happier, whilst the ‘control freak micro-managers' are now seen to be the menace they really are. And quite markedly, all that travel for visits and meetings has been proven an expensive luxury that can be largely serviced via video conferencing. Going back to the old norms actually risks a significant reduction in productivity.

In the land of tough business and management regimes - the USA - companies trying to force people back to the office and the old ways have seen resignations on an epidemic scale. And this at a time when there are just not enough people available to power the recovery.

Paradoxically, every nation in the first world is now seeing mass vacancies with no one available to employ. How come? Managers and politicians misread the situation and drastically reduced production and services. The net result is a shortage of raw materials, construction and manufacturing supplies, exacerbated by people and skill shortages.

In the UK, for example, we are short of more than 150,000 technologists, 100,000 lorry drivers, 100,000 medics, and so on.

Today, there is a huge microelectronic chip shortage adding to the overall reduction in economic activity, the growth of inflation, rising costs and reduced standards of living.

Given the stemming of the free flow of labour across the EU into the UK, and migration into the USA by political forces, there is only one solution available - automation. Today China dominates the AI, automation, and robot user market with more than threefold the tech-investment of than any other nation. China has also started recruiting people from the West with specific technical expertise to the point of starting a visiting Nobel Laureate Programme. And all this despite their massive education drive to become self-sufficient.

If we needed a portent of the future, China might just be it. But the situation is actually made much worse by the growing challenges of global warming, and as a species we are going to have to be far more adaptable. Let's see how fast we can change.

Peter Cochrane OBE is Professor of Sentient Systems at the University of Suffolk