Very little will remain unchanged by COVID-19: Politics, socioeconomics, business, work and, quite simply, life as we know it.
Geopolitics will change. Will European solidarity withstand the pressure for Germans to prioritize Germans, Italians their fellow countrymen and women, etc.? Will China be ostracized by the global community? Or further embraced? National politics will change. Will populism surge, or will deep states reassert themselves at a time when only governments have the scale to deal with existential threats?
Socioeconomics will change. The overnight nationalization of economies in avowedly capitalist countries will supercharge simmering debates about wealth inequality. Will faith in capitalism be weakened or strengthened by the stress test faced by economies around the world? Business will change. Will global supply chains withstand breakdowns in what has become business-as-usual over the last generation or two? Will reshoring and localization require a complete about-turn for how multinationals operate? Will Mr. Justin Time survive? Work will change. Will everyone work from home? Virtually? Will robots and AI be more popular or less so? (Their bugs seem sort of tame in comparison …) Will the gig economy be wiped away or the only port in a global storm? Life will change. Will we ever shake hands again? Will we ever again sit next to a total stranger on a 15-hour flight? Will we pull up the drawbridges around our homes? These, and a whole host of other facets of life and business as we know it, will all be changed by the pleomorphic spherical particles with bulbous surface projections that roam among us. In this special report, the team from Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work considers what the world will look like in 2023 – a time that’s far enough away for the implications of the virus to have materially changed things but not so far away that pure idle speculation reigns supreme.
We write from a future perspective – as if we are chronicling events in the year 2025 and are looking back on the changes that occurred in the days, months and years following the great crisis of 2020. The report examines how education, health, shopping and entertainment became more virtual. How online interactive dinner parties, concerts and political rallies became common and “real” versions withered. How houses were retrofitted with dedicated home office spaces (routers in the right place, soundproofed, separate entrances, pre-built Gorilla Glass wall screens) as working from home became the norm, not the exception. It records that travel became a last, not first, resort, and those who did leave the house were subject to “OK2GO” scans on entering other buildings.
It finds that the environmental agenda gathered momentum (once the immediate crunch abated) as we realized the virus was a scream for help from a planet that had added six billion people in under 100 years, and as we further realized just how dirty (metaphorically and literally) the Earth had become.
The virus forced a reckoning of how we treat aging and how we regard privacy – the health monitoring that sprang up in China, Singapore and Israel spread around the world before we knew it. Of course, it sounded sensible, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
