Page 44 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

In the coming months, the unemployment situation is bound to
deteriorate further for the simple reason that it cannot improve

significantly until a sustainable economic recovery begins. This
won’t happen before a vaccine or a treatment is found, meaning
that many people will be doubly worried – about losing their job
and about not finding another one if they do lose it (which will lead

to a sharp increase in savings rates). In a slightly more distant
time (from a few months to a few years), two categories of people
will face a particularly bleak employment situation: young people
entering for the first time a job market devastated by the pandemic

and workers susceptible to be replaced by robots. These are
fundamental issues at the intersection of economics, society and
technology with defining implications for the future of work.
Automation, in particular, will be a source of acute concern. The

economic case that technology always exerts a positive economic
effect in the long term is well known. The substance of the
argument goes like this: automation is disruptive, but it improves
productivity and increases wealth, which in turn lead to greater

demands for goods and services and thus to new types of jobs to
satisfy those demands. This is correct, but what happens between
now and the long term?

In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will
trigger a sharp increase in labour-substitution, meaning that

physical labour will be replaced by robots and “intelligent”
machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural
changes in the labour market. In the technology chapter, we

analyse in more detail the impact that the pandemic is having on
automation, but there is already ample evidence that it is
accelerating the pace of transformation. The call centre sector
epitomizes this situation.

In the pre-pandemic era, new artificial intelligence (AI)-based

technologies were being gradually introduced to automate some
of the tasks performed by human employees. The COVID-19
crisis, and its accompanying measures of social distancing, has
suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological

change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition
technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can

43