Experts say social distancing directives, likely to continue in some form after the COVID-19 crisis, could prompt various industries to accelerate automation
Broad unease about losing jobs to machines could dissipate as people focus on the benefits of minimizing close human contact.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
Before the pandemic, automation was already a competitive race with little regard for workers — conversations with executives at the World Economic Forum in early 2019 showed many firms pushing ahead regardless of job impact (racing toward automation to stay ahead of competition). What changed with COVID-19 is the justification: distancing directives give companies a public-health rationale for replacing close human contact with machines.
Call center workers face immediate displacement risk as operators accelerate the shift to chatbots and AI under cover of distancing requirements.
Manufacturers and e-commerce companies begin directing capital toward robots for cleaning, spacing, and filling possible worker shortages.
Second-order effects
When labor shortages materialized, they reinforced rather than reversed the pivot — by 2021 US firms were adopting automation faster than before the pandemic (labor shortages driving greater adoption), turning a crisis workaround into standard practice.
Firms that automate for health reasons gain a cost and resilience advantage over slower rivals, pressuring competitors to match the investment or concede margin.
Third-order effects
If distancing-normalized automation persists after the crisis, the pre-pandemic pattern — automation driven by competition regardless of worker impact — returns with a durable new justification attached, deepening the split between remote-capable and contact-required jobs.
Public unease about machines taking jobs may structurally weaken as health framing reframes automation as safety infrastructure, lowering political resistance to future deployments.
The trend: COVID-19 is converting automation from a competitive choice into a health-and-resilience imperative, accelerating adoption across contact-heavy industries well beyond the pandemic itself.
“Hospitals, grocery stores and other essential services are enlisting robots in the fight against the #coronavirus outbreak, accelerating an already fast-growing market for workplace automation,” writes @angusloten in @WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/...
Whatever apprehension business leaders had wrt automation & AI to replace humans? Gone. https://www.techmeme.com/... This decade will see massive changes in AI, automation, Retail to eCommerce & massive dislocation/displacement of workforces. https://www.youtube.com/...
Robots in, jobs gone. Worried about this? @ABC7NY as my own protest, I always go to the humans in fast food joints and stores. On occasion, a clerk has said “hey you could have entered your order over there” and I counter “nah — care about your job sticking around.” https://twitt…
“Pre-pandemic, people might have thought we were automating too much,” said a professor who researches the psychological factors around automation. “This event is going to push people to think what more should be automated.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
It is not the technological singularity of AI that creates technological unemployment, but the pandemic of COVID-19 that creates AI-driven technological unemployment. https://twitter.com/...
“People become more expensive as companies' revenues decline,” he said. A new wave of automation could also mean that when companies start hiring again, they do so in smaller numbers." https://www.nytimes.com/...
It was inevitable tbh. After this virus blows over we will be confronting many hard truths about our society and how we choose to lift up the poor and working class. https://twitter.com/...
Robots Welcome to Take Over, as Pandemic Accelerates Automation https://www.nytimes.com/... Precisely, as @ScottSantens spelled out in his article, but NYT leaves out advocacy for #EmergencyUBI and. #UBI
Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs. But labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives could prompt more industries to accelerate its use. https://www.nytimes.com/...