I recently received an email from my employer, the Miami Herald, whose subject line read, "We are moving." I want to share parts of it with you, because it's a preview of what's coming everywhere in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of how our lives will change.
"We will be moving out of our office by the end of the summer," Herald publisher and executive editor Mindy Marques wrote in the email. "Here's why: The pandemic has accelerated our organization's ability to work remotely. At the same time, COVID-19 has changed our revenue picture dramatically."
It continued saying, "We've learned over the past months that given the right hardware, software and support, our team can be extremely productive while working from home." It added that the company will move to a new place "where we can host visitors, gather and work together in a workspace that complements remote work."
Welcome to the post-COVID-19 remote work world. It's not just happening in the newspaper industry, where dailies are struggling to survive, but across the board. Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other corporations have already announced that some or all of their employees will work remotely for the rest of the year, if not longer.
A recent Gallup survey found that working from home soared from 31% in mid-March to 62% in mid-April. It has probably jumped much higher since then, as more companies have given out laptops and high-speed internet connections to allow employees to work remotely.
As I wrote my 2019 book, "The robots are coming!: The future of work in the age of automation," working remotely, flexible hours and the automation of many jobs were bound to become the norm in this decade. Now it's bound to happen immediately.
While many employees will work remotely using Zoom, Slack or Google Hangout, supermarkets will increasingly use automated cashiers. Why use human cashiers who can get COVID-19 from touching thousands of packages and bills a day, when automated cashiers can do the same job, and more cheaply?
Likewise, factories will find it increasingly safer to replace workers with industrial robots. Unlike human workers standing next to one another at the assembly line, robots don't get infected with COVID-19, nor will they be infected by future pandemics.
And, remember, many industrial robots now cost less than a year's worth of wages of a human worker, and they can work three shifts a day, don't take vacations, and never ask for a raise.
For many Americans, life will change for the better. Millions will go to the office once or twice a week and will avoid wasting two hours a day commuting. That alone will allow them more time to spend with their families or to exercise.
People working from home, e-learning and patients interacting with their doctors through tele-medicine will help big cities become more livable. There will be less traffic, and that may help drastically reduce pollution and global warming.
Granted, car factories will have to change their business models, and many restaurants near big office buildings will disappear or relocate to the suburbs. But in the past, technology has always created more jobs than it has destroyed.
While technological changes are happening faster than ever, and many jobs will vanish, the digital and robotics revolution will create new opportunities. The COVID-19 crisis forced tens of millions to get used to working remotely _ Zoom says its number of daily meeting participants soared from 10 million in December to 300 million in March _ remote freelance work internet platforms like Upwork.com and Freelance.com will allow millions more to work for faraway companies around the world.
But among the downsides of the post-COVID-19 remote work and automation trends will be the danger of greater inequality within rich countries, and a widening gap between the developed world and poorer countries. While the United States, China and South Korea already are well-advanced in 5G high-speed internet connections and robotics, Latin America is only starting to get into it.
We will probably be debating for decades whether the new digital and automated workplace will make us freer and happier, or lonelier and sadder. But there's no going back. My bet is that we will keep living longer and better, as we have been doing since we used to live barefoot in caves. But the transition to the post-COVID-19 labor market will be brutally quick and, often, traumatic.
