COVID-19: The Great Artificial Intelligence Accelerator Posted on : Jul 03 - 2020

The world is in the midst of a historical turning point. The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively halted life as we once knew it, and left the open question, “what will our world look like when ‘normal’ life resumes?” While we don’t have a crystal ball that allows us to peer into the future, history has given us a template on what to expect.

Past pandemics have shaped politics, crashed economies, purred revolutions and produced other profound societal transformations. In the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed more than 60 percent of Europe’s population – a dramatic population decline that actually improved living standards for the survivors and marked the decline in serfdom. After the 1918 Spanish Flu, governments across the world realized the importance of researching infectious disease outbreaks, which led to dramatic improvements in global health care systems. Yet, in both of these instances, the beginnings of these changes were seeded before either outbreak began. Pandemics do not change the direction of world history but instead, they help accelerate it.

To determine what our world will look like post-COVID-19, we need to consider how our society was already changing. Long before the COVID-19 overtook the global conversation, technology was already causing major changes to the ways in which we live and work.

Like the steam engine and printing press before it, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a revolutionary technology that is predicted to propel our economy and profoundly change the way we live and work. Whenever a new development has the promise to make such a profound impact, people usually react with a mix of fear, excitement and uncertainty. The notion of imminent mass unemployment because of automation once troubled the nation. In reality, the U.S. has witnessed an unprecedented spike in unemployment – but not from AI and instead as a side-effect of the global outbreak. View More