未来就是现在

英文原文

As we are wrapping up 2020, I look back at my behavior, mostly locked down and home. The adoption of new technological behaviors and practices in response to the pandemic, from video-conferencing on Google Hangout to online shipping on Amazon, suggests adopting these tools and platforms has now reached levels that were not foreseen for many more years or decades.  

In May 2020, McKinsey’s report suggested that we have jumped five years ahead in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of just eight weeks. Just look at our behavior in online shopping. In the US alone, progress was even more rapid:  “ten years’ growth in three months.”   Let’s look at how we do banking around the world. The percentage of cashless transactions globally has jumped to levels we had anticipated to see in two to five years. In medicine, the British NHS had experienced a decade of change within a week, as doctors switched to remote consultation and telemedicine.  

COVID-19 carried with it an enormous wave of tech-celeration. Look around you; the pandemic has expedited existing trends of technological adoption. Shopping was reasonably steadily moving online; payments were slowly going digital; online learning was slowly becoming more common; more people worked from home, at least some of the time. Now people in many countries have been abruptly moved into a future where all of these behaviors are far more widespread.  

The pandemic and its abrupt transformation have been painful and disturbing. Many retailers, now in difficulty, have been pushed into bankruptcy. In America, household names such as J.C. Penny, Neiman Marcus, and J CREW (one of my favorites) are gone. In every city in America, bank branches closing, older adults unfamiliar with online banking have been targeted by scammers. The switch to online learning highlighted inequality in internet access and computer ownership among students.  

There is good news too. The transition has also sparked a fast transformation in many areas, prominently health and education, that are historically resistant to reform. Mass lockdowns’ enforced experiment has de-stigmatized online learning and remote working by showing that they can work at scale with the right tools and support.  

Perhaps one of the most critical questions for 2021 is: how much will things around us go back to pre-pandemic time? I don’t think the world is going to return to its pre-pandemic state. Many stores, even restaurants, have closed. Even Italian grannies have realized the joys of online shopping, and they are putting it to the test this holiday season. Home-workers are in no hurry to return to commuting five or sometimes six days a week. But nor will all the lockdown behavior of 2020 continue. Students and teachers are eager to return to in-person classes. Even workers also miss the camaraderie of the office. So some new behaviors will still, but not all, and the result will be somewhere in the middle. But where will it have enormous implications? I think transportation models, property prices, and even our cities’ design, among other things.  

By 2020 according to a recent McKinsey report, 15% of executives who took part in an international poll expect to allow a tenth of their workers to work remotely for two or more days a week, and 75% were willing to stretch this to three days a week. But those averages hide wide variation. In Germany and Europe, 20% of respondents were happy for at least one in ten workers to work remotely two or more days a week: in China, the figure was just 4%. And among technology executives, the proportion stood at 34%, surprisingly up from 22% before the pandemic. Firms in sectors like technology and finance can also operate more efficiently without employees on site. But even in industries where fully remote working is possible, the most likely outcome is a hybrid future that mixes remote and in person working.   

I believe the future is now. Companies like those that provide services in the cloud or devices that support remote working will get more powerful. Others, like brick-and-mortar retailers, will suffer. Many will fail altogether. But once again, there is a silver lining, as these developments open up new fields for innovation. Now companies big and small are devising new means to improve the experience of remote working, collaboration, and learning: to promote new kinds of contactless and appointment-based retailing: and to provide new types of online social occasions, from virtual conferencing to virtual tourism or museum visits. There is no going back to the past that lived before the pandemic. Alternatively, COVDI-19 has moved the world into a very different future.