There’s been much discussion of AI taking jobs and all of the concerns/benefits around this. The current state of tech is less about AI and more about automation as our ability to have machines do repetitive tasks that humans are less inclined toward (and more error-proned at) is upon us.

That debate has shifted in an interesting way due to the pandemic. We rightfully now have great concern for the well-being of workers in what has been deemed “essential” jobs in the service economic like logistics, food service, retail and others who are needed and have contact with people. The same jobs that were starting to be automated. The technology rush was already happening given the huge cost savings and quality improvements around automation. Now, those ethics questions have shifted as we’re trying to find way to expose service workers less. How do we deploy automation alongside humans to make them more efficient and now lessen their human contact?

The threat of the virus isn’t going away anytime soon. Stay safe.