Twenty or thirty years after the invention of the
printing press most people still couldn’t read and few books were printed
anyway. So too while the Internet has changed life considerably in the past
decades it hasn’t really changed how most of us have worked. We still got up
early in the morning and got into cars, trains or busses and travelled to our
place of work. The jobs that people did in 2020 were not that different to the
jobs they did in 1980. But that is going to change rapidly now, not so much
because of the Internet but because the Internet enables us to avoid other
people.
Change is resisted. Most of us don’t like
it. For the past decades we have pretended that the physical could go on just
the same even when it had been replaced by the virtual. But Covid 19 has ended
that pretence.
There are some people who are required today to go out
and interact with other people. This is because the nature of their job
requires it and society requires that their job continues even when most of us
are stuck at home. This work is essential. Everything else is inessential.
Doctors and nurses still need to turn up at hospitals
and risk becoming infected themselves because their job for the most part
cannot be done virtually. Doctors might be able to talk with patients with
video calls, but sometimes they have to be able to see them and touch them.
Treatment still involves a physical interaction between a nurse and a patient.
Supermarkets already have automatic checkouts and the present crisis will accelerate the move to
automation, but there still need to be people who deliver stock and put it on
the shelves.
Rubbish collection cannot be done virtually, yet
without it there would be a greater public health crisis than there already is.
People still need to drive around emptying bins. There are some other essential
jobs. The police, the army, farmers and factory workers are needed in this
crisis. The rest of us are not needed.
The fact that we are stuck at home is damaging the
economy, but otherwise the world is continuing as normal. We can buy what we
need from the shops. We have power in our homes. We are safe and secure. What
do we do when we are at work then? What good does it do, if it is unnecessary
now? We produce goods and services that we trade with other countries and with
ourselves that create wealth. This will become crucial again soon enough,
because it pays the costs of those jobs that are essential, but for the moment our
country in its time of crisis can do without us.
The inessential people stuck at home are divided into
two groups. There are those of us who can work and there are those of us who
cannot. If your job involves sitting in front of a computer and interacting
with it, then it is for the most part possible to continue as if nothing has
happened. It might be a bit lonely at home, but universities, for example, can
with little adaptation function perfectly adequately. Students can have
discussions with academics. They can read books and articles online. Research
that does not involve interacting with physical objects or travel can continue
in many cases just as well as before. When change becomes necessary it happens
quickly.
Many jobs that at present require physical interaction
could in theory be done virtually. It should be possible to have virtual court
rooms with lawyers and juries and defendants. But other jobs clearly require
people to be able to travel and interact. Why go to a pub to buy beer and wine if
you can’t sit in it and chat? It is far cheaper to buy alcohol from the
supermarket.
Those people who are stuck at home, but able to
continue working may find that once this crisis has passed, they will continue
to do so indefinitely. If journalists can write articles at home and readers
can read them online, what is the point of physical newspapers? If writers can write
novels and they can be distributed to a Kindle, why have bookshops? If people
can work just as effectively at home why are we all getting up early and
travelling to an office. What purpose does this office have? Deduct the cost of buying or renting office
space as well as the travel costs and you have a new way of making profit.
The danger for those who cannot work at home is that
the world goes on perfectly adequately without their work. If I can buy all I
need online, physical shops will cease to have a purpose. Will they even reopen?
We are learning to live without buying expensive
coffee at Starbucks. We can eat perfectly adequately without going to
restaurants and drink all we please from cans and bottles bought at the
supermarket. We can be entertained by online streaming and have no need to go
to Cinemas. We are discovering lots of jobs that we can do without.
There used to be all sorts of jobs that existed in
previous centuries that barely exist at all now. When people began to drive
cars, the jobs associated with horses declined. We are in the midst of a
similar Covidian revolution. It was going to happen anyway, but Covid 19 and the need to
live virtually is going to make it happen more quickly. Those of us who are
stuck at home are inessential workers, but those of us who are both inessential
and unable to work from home might as well be gas lamplighters trying to
compete with Edison.
