Crisis presents opportunity
[Excerpts published in Korean in Chosun Ilbo Newspaper]
The pandemic is creating a new normal. We're never going to return to the world that we had, although we may eventually reach some kind of stable equilibrium. The pandemic forces us the advance to the future at a faster rate, adopting technologies of telepresence, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotic deliveries and avatars, additive manufacturing, etc at a much faster rate than before. In essence, this situation is enabling these technologies to 'cross the chasm' as Geoffrey Moore would put it, between the early adopters, and the mainstream. Now even the older generations are visiting their doctors remotely, whilst distributed production centers create critically-needed PPE supplies through 3D printing.
In essence, any industry or task that must be done as an in-person experience is in major trouble for the foreseeable future. Personal care, restaurants and pubs, zoos, arts & entertainment – all must somehow adapt to providing meaningful substitutes for the in-person experience, or face going out of business. Some of these companies may adapt, offering home alternatives, and virtual experiences, although these can be difficult to monetize. There are many opportunities for those who can make difficult things that one often relies upon others for help with more idiot-proof, so they can be done at home, such as cutting one's own hair, plucking one's own eyebrows.
Corporate management must learn how to best protect the health of their employees or risk lawsuits for criminal negligence should someone fall ill. It's very important that as much as possible flows through an office via open windows, rather than circulating through air conditioning. Any indoor environment with circulating air is very dangerous in these times, and this includes public transit. People should work from home as much as possible, and if commuting is necessary, they should avoid public transit, or at the very least stagger their working hours to avoid peak times, and ensure that they wear a well-fitting mask onboard.
Leadership is needed in recognizing that we are now in a different world, and it has harsh realities, but opportunities also. We must not allow akrasia and despair to prevent drastic action being taken where it is appropriate to do so. Successful companies will pivot where necessary, keeping one foot on the ground (their core competencies), and swiveling the other towards a new direction. For example, switching to making PPE or tests, or distributing to directly to the public instead of wholesale.
The pandemic is not a black swan event, it was predictable. What may be a black swan is how most governments responded to it. Despite having a long advance warning, many of them refused to take it seriously, or to make emergency preparations until it was clear that the outcome would be very bad indeed, when it was already too late.
South Korea & Taiwan have been a shining light in this pandemic. The US and South Korea had their first known cases on the same day, and yet the response could not have been different. South Korea took notes from previous coronavirus outbreaks (SARS & MERS) and applied those lessons immediately. Testing continuously and exhaustively, scrupulous contact tracing, and public yet anonymized actionable data, are the best tools that we have to fight this virus. Now, many countries are finding that despite lockdowns, transmission rates are dropping slowly, or may even have plateaued. They are learning that South Korea's approach was the correct one. Constant testing, and the wearing of masks, is the only proper and responsible way to combat this virus.
Consumers have rediscovered the things that actually matter in life – health, friends & family, meaningful work. It will be very challenging to appeal to consumers that they should buy something for some kind of status signaling or aspiration. People have less money to spend on average, and they will be much more selective on spending it on those things that they derive genuine meaning from. They will buy very few clothes or flashy items, spend almost nothing on transportation or holidays, but may spend more on hobbies instead.
We are also now confronted more with the waste that we create – It's not always easy to get it collected. Scraps of food are now increasingly viewed as valuable compost material instead of something to be taken away. A return to home farming and even chicken coops in one's garden is also bringing people closer to nature. It seems likely that this will persist, that urban life will have less appeal, and that people will start to think about the health of nature as being directly connected with their own, especially as the skies are now so clear of dirty particulates. However, the lack of contrails from massively reduced air travel may create a climactic whiplash effect. There is some evidence from WW2 and 9/11 that sudden differences in the number of aircraft in the sky can radically alter temperature and moisture.
Telecommuting facilitates connection at a faster rate. We are embracing the ability to bring dozens or hundreds of people together instantly as a quorum to discuss or work on a problem. Many conferences may stay as virtual events even post-pandemic, or offer far more sophisticated virtual versions for those who do not wish to travel. We are likely to see a long-term reduction in people's willingness to travel, as people outfit their homes with studios that they can broadcast from in high fidelity. It will be a lot harder to charge a lot of money for events, but it will be a lot easier and faster to put events together, and on balance, I feel this is likely to increase the rate of cultural and scientific transmission.
The pandemic is likely to shake up the distribution of wealth, though it remains to be seen how that lands. I find it distressing that hedge funds have been receiving bailouts in many countries as they volunteered to take these risks, understanding how random events such as disease can and does happen. It's unfair to privatize gains, but to externalize the costs of failing to prepare for disaster to society. There will be winners and losers from this situation. Those who are suck in bricks and mortar businesses are in serious trouble if they cannot find ways to virtualize. Those operating tech businesses will be in a comparatively better position. However, the venture markets are naturally very bearish at present, and many companies will fail to find investment in these times, or to secure crucial bridge funding. The days when a company like Lyft could raise an IPO without any path to profitability are over. A company must now be able to maintain itself directly to be investible, not merely on offering future promise.
Millions of jobs have been lost due to this crisis, and that is likely to continue for a long time as many companies die off. My hope is that many find new forms of work in a virtualized world. However, we are likely to see great social distress and upset if people cannot find a way to support themselves. There is a rollout of (some) salary payment for furloughed workers in many nations as a temporary measure, but it's possible that some of these elements may stay, as a form of basic income. Handling the social and economic chaos of these times will be an even greater set of crises than the pandemic itself, but for me, there are even further concerns.
The lockdowns in China have lead to massive crop and livestock failures, as food could not be planted, harvested, taken care of, or brought to market due to lockdowns and a frustration of migrant labor. Animal feed has been difficult to source, at a time when pigs have been mass-culled for contracting Swine Fever, and chickens and ducks infected with deadly Bird Flu. Many of these logistical problems have followed the virus to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, a massive swarm of crop-ravaging locusts is ravaging back and forth in successive waves in a belt all the way from Sudan to Western China. Meanwhile food production is being scuppered by massive outbreaks in food production plants, particularly meat plants, where workers toil in close proximity in cold environments where the virus can linger for weeks. Meat prices are now rising, and other foods will likely follow.
About 35 countries are now expected to experience famine as a result of the coronavirus in the worst case, according to the World Food Program. More than 5 million people in South Sudan already rely on food aid to survive, which naturally cannot be transported easily in these times. We are likely to see a destabilization of many zones due to these mounting crises, as people enter neighbouring regions seeking food and sanctuary, and bringing disease alongside them in their cramped, dirty, and malnourished conditions. If everyone with a patch of garden or an allotment plants some Potatoes and Spinach, and ideally a builds chicken coop too, it will go a long way to alleviating this crisis, not only for you and your family, but for every other hungry creature on Earth.
It looks as if a K-shaped 'recovery' is manifesting. High-tech companies are getting stronger during this crisis (in fact, Big Tech is massively outpacing everything else). Companies in low-tech sectors that cannot adapt or digitize fast enough are in major trouble.
I think there are tremendous opportunities to rethink events and hospitality. I'm impressed by companies such as FX Agency and Borrel that are taking telepresence into new formats that offer far more vicarious experiences that are much closer to the nature of shared experiences and physical interactions with others. Organizers of events and artforms who can embrace such new ways for people to enjoy collective experiences will survive this pandemic, whereas those who cannot make the leap are likely to become extinct.
It seems clear that we are on the verge of something very special with Transformer-based AI – another revolution similar to the advent of Deep Learning ten years ago. Deep Learning techniques showed us the power of throwing very large datasets at problems, and the disproportionate benefit from doing so. Transformer technologies (such as GPT-3 recently released by OpenAI) show something similar, except with the amount of compute time and parameters instead of data. GPT-3 is a very generalizable algorithm for making sense of text that has been trained on most of the public internet. It is capable of a great many feats, including translation between langauges, imitating not only styles but individual writers, computing high school math problems, turning pictures into code, even suggesting reasonable dosages of medicine for patients with a variety of conditions and body masses. GPT-3 is very convincing, it almost has a spark of life about it, and interacting with it can be truly eerie. It's only faking understanding, but that illusion is incredibly powerful, and often hilarious too. All of it is accessible via a handy API also, no need to code or host one's own solutions.
This is a huge leap ahead from the previous state of play. AI is coming out of the lab. It is finally becoming actually useful for tasks that most people have an interest in using it for. We can expect stupendously large models of even greater capability to emerge very shortly (in a matter of months). For these reasons, I believe that 2021 is going to be a moment of discontinuity in machine intelligence. A Sputnik moment is nigh that will awaken everyone to the possibilities of these technologies, creating a landrush for immediately deployable applications.One of the biggest problems with the pandemic is the K-factor – the number of superspreading events. We are now learning the pandemic isn't generally being spread from person to person. Rather, clusters are seeded by certain individuals who infect dozens of others. They might be particularly gregarious and friendly, or they might see a large number of people in an enclosed environment, or they might offer lots of people the same pen, like a lawyer.
If we can better pinpoint the events, locations, personalities, or professions where such events are likely to occur, we could rather quickly bring the viral replication rate far lower. The predictive capabilities of machine intelligence might help us to do that. There are many tiny sensors in our device, such as capacitive touch sensors and accelerometers. The way that people interact with their device can tell us a lot about their state of mind – intoxication, mood, energy levels, etc. By bringing these data elements together (a process known as cross-correlation), we might be able to make deep inferences about where and how a superspreading event is likely to occur.
Our smart watches have heart monitors, and increasingly pulse oximetry also. We can use similar predictive algorithms here to monitor heart signatures for a prodromal signature – the changes in the body that occur when one has been infected, but one doesn't yet feel sick. This is often the most easily transmissible period, because people likely don't consciously realize that they may be at increased risk of infecting others. Our smart watches may provide us with an early warning system, akin to an engine warning light on a car. 'Infection signature detected, please take extra precautions'.
Of course, just because we have the capability to do these things doesn't mean that we necessarily should. One of the greatest questions of this year has been how far do we risk treading upon privacy and other liberties in the name of preventing disease. I am very proud to have contributed to the Contact Tracing Apps / Contact Tracing Technologies guidelines from the IEEE Standards Association, which is aimed at helping to secure such systems, as well as the organizations deploying them.
'Lights Out' is a new concept in production, whereby so much has been automated that very little human oversight is required.
Robots have been uses in car factories for many decades for repeated routine procedural work on identical components, programmed directly by a human controller.
Now, advances in robotics in recent years have made robots much more flexible in how they respond to situations. They can now assess a situation and act dynamically, thanks to machine vision systems, as well as machine learning.
For example, robots might provide basic Quality Assurance on a component it receives, with an ability to sort, paint, or fold something based on a range of parameters. Robots have also been miniaturised, and provided with sophisticated manipulators (hands) so that they can work at a range of scales (such as picking up or fitting an individual nut).
Digital twins provide further opportunities. These are simulated copies of a system located within a virtual environment. Such model versions can be used to explore different scenarios and predictions, thereby increasing efficiency and reliability. Digital twins also enable new ways of troubleshooting difficult problems, to hunt for reasons why a failure or degradation of service may have occurred. Digital twins could be houses, factories, hospitals, cities, or perhaps eventually the human body.
The pandemic has made formerly benign activities much more dangerous. For example, bus drivers and food processing workers are at tremendous risk of infection, due to working in enclosed spaces, or at low temperatures. Individuals working in such environments have frequently become superspreaders, passing infections caught on the job on to the families and the wider community.
Robotics can help us by taking humans away from dangerous activities, and by providing new ways of doing things remotely. Robotic Avatar technologies are emerging, which can enable one to remotely pilot a robot using a Head Mounted Display, in order to explore or perform work in another location.
The transportation of products is also changing rapidly thanks to these developments. The first autonomous cargo ships are now in operation in canals in Germany, and are coming soon to international waters. On the far ends, ports are now planning to become increasingly automated. Automated Warehousing technologies are already in significant deployment, at least for moving goods ahead. Picking and packing of products is more challenging, but is also beginning to be automated.
Management of inventory and shipping is a significant expense for organizations. By switching to lights-off model, warehousing activities can be done cheaply and efficiently at all hours, enabling greater efficiency and a smaller geographic and energy footprint. Indoor autonomous activities within a predictable and bounded layout, away from the public, are also a great deal safer and more easily controlled than those where a machine might encounter the public.
We are now a entering an age where products will be created, quality checked, packing, shipped, and delivered entirely without any direct human aid or intervention.