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Now Hiring: Burger-Flipping, Crime Fighting Robots
Covid hastened the trend to automate. Are we ready for the rise of the job-killing robots?
COVID19 changed some things forever and calcified others. Some trends were revealed, others were hastened; still others were arrested completely, at least for the foreseeable future.
Wouldn’t it have been nice to know, two years ago in February of 2020, exactly how much, and in what ways, the coming pandemic would upend all our lives?
Economists call things like COVID19 “Black Swan Events”- such an unusual event defies anyone’s capacity to predict it.
Still, there were financial winners and losers during the course of mankind’s battle with the novel coronavirus thus far.
The ten wealthiest men in the world doubled their wealth during COVID19, according to Oxfam, much to the chagrin of a world grappling with an already astronomical wealth gap between the have-everythings and the have-nothings.
The hospitality industry, with all its attendant restaurants, hotels, and cancelled corporate conventions suffered spectacular losses, as did the entertainment industry.
In the aftermath, it seems clear some covid mitigation measures will have consequences as hard to bear in the long-term as the virus itself.