(A sci-fi story.)
Early 2020: COVID19 pandemic begins. Mass quarantines enacted around the world. National economies shut down to inhibit the spread of the disease and ease the burden on failing healthcare systems. Millions with reduced or zero income.
Early 2020: COVID19 pandemic begins. Mass quarantines enacted around the world. National economies shut down to inhibit the spread of the disease and ease the burden on failing healthcare systems. Millions with reduced or zero income.
Late 2020: Developed world on war footing with virus. Economies transformed to support the fight. Food, medical, information, and e-tail sectors deliver big. Economic depression for most, esp service sector. No end in sight for fallout => social unrest => political action.
2021-2023: New govt leaders around the world preside over a slow, painful recovery by introducing a series of reforms. Basic income is introduced in many places as a temporary measure, though clearly will be impossible to dislodge.
High uncertainty, slow bounceback, and lots of stimulus money for airlines, travel, tourism, and more. Some chaos where companies get nationalized. Uncertainty impacts energy: oil up at stimulus news, stabilizes a bit below pre-pandemic as real demand becomes clear.
Lots of setbacks getting people back to work. Biggest: megaco's accelerate drive to replace virus-susceptible service workers with robotics+AI solutions, drone delivery. Demand for robots and tech specs are finally meeting due to recent advances.
Public funding for medical research soars. National security and public health are now fully recognized as intertwined, and medical manufacturing continues to flourish. Medical and AI begin to dovetail as new AI capabilities allow unbelievably cheap and scalable diagnostics.
Cold war between China and USA becomes more pronounced. China capitalizes on US weakness, projects appearance of strength with propaganda and occasional adventurous behavior, aggressively messages that US is in decline. Never needs to turn hot to be effective, so it doesn't.
Deurbanization becomes significant trend for multiple reasons. Fastest-acting reason: hardest-hit cities decline as spooked public moves to less-urban areas for personal health concerns. Longer-term reasons: economic incentives are fundamentally changing in permanent way.
Because of basic income, opportunities in cities no longer uniformly outweigh quality of life cost. Plus, the mass quarantines resulted in many successful WFH/remote work experiments: most businesses now have sufficient experience with this that they can bet longer-term on it.
Mix of worldwide suppression and mitigation measures pay off and hold worldwide death toll below 10M from 2019-2021. A vaccine is developed and established as safe+effective by mid/late 2021, widely deployed early 2022. In many countries, zero new cases in 2023. Pandemic over.
2024-2030: There is no return to pre-2020 normalcy. But there is a new normal, and it's stable and tolerable to most. Economies grow and recover but in unfamiliar ways.
Unemployment everywhere shifts up by 5-10 percentage points as new normal, but tolerable due to basic income and expanded social safety nets in most countries. Projected to increase further over time as AI+robotics decrease demand for unskilled and skilled labor.
Medicare-for-all doesn't materialize in US, but new regulations on pricing/insurance cos, aggressive red tape cutting on private providers, new advances from publicly-funded health science, and industry appetite to build anew combine to make US healthcare finally sane/afforadble.
Natsec concerns about supply chains for coping with pandemics/other tail risks lead to shift in priorities on international trade. Not uniform protectionism: new focus on building and safe-guarding home medical supply chains and trying to make other countries depend on yours.
Policymakers shaken by the COVID19 crisis wake up to tail risks and long-term risks they had previously discounted or ignored, now that they've experienced one explode in their faces. Obvious: govts double down on world health coordination, pandemic prep.
Govts also begin serious longer-term risk planning for climate crisis and post-labor economies created by accelerating AI advances. World is safer, though it will take a long time to feel that way.
(fin.)
(fin.)
Epilogue: tired of being GOAT at everything in entertainment, Donald Glover gets into politics in the late 2020s. Eventually elected US President
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I have no idea how likely most of this is! (Except the bit about Donald Glover, that's a slam dunk.) I did a bunch of reading along the way to make not-totally-uneducated guesses, but I am quite far from an expert on any of this.
I have no idea how likely most of this is! (Except the bit about Donald Glover, that's a slam dunk.) I did a bunch of reading along the way to make not-totally-uneducated guesses, but I am quite far from an expert on any of this.
I wrote it because writing is fun, and because I found the exercise a bit cathartic. Even if things won't go back to "normal" anytime soon, I can imagine lots of ways we all get back to feeling like things are safe and stable. I find that comforting. Hopefully you do too.
