Lockdown Perspectives

100 days of lockdown. Millions infected, hundreds of thousands lost, thousands infected and hundreds losing lives every day. There seems to be no end to the ordeal. Humanity had come to a stop but realized there is no running away from the virus by stopping. Instead, it had to be taken head-on and life have to restart. For the blessed like us and most readers working from home, once the initial shock of stay-at-home diminished, the “pandemic productivity” movement began. Suddenly, friends and colleagues were sharing photos of alphabetized book cabinets, grueling workouts, and enough baking to fuel a weeklong sugar high. There was a growing sense that if you didn’t emerge from the crisis speaking Japanese, playing a new instrument and sporting a six-pack, you are failing to make the most of your lockdown. Yet this pandemic gave us this rare realization that we’re all in transition. Our lives and routines have been disrupted and, in some cases, changed forever. If we can tune out the social pressure for self-improvement, it has been a good time to explore our true values. Ask “what do I find most meaningful?” You might find that you’re pulled in an unfamiliar direction, like making a major pivot in your life. Or you might realize that you’re drawn to go deeper to home in on a niche area. Or a service which you always wished but now you can!

One thing the pandemic has shown us is how important technology is for maintaining and facilitating communication - not simply for work, but for building real emotional connections. In the next few years we can expect to see this progress accelerate, with AI built to connect people at a human level and drive them closer to each other, even when physically they’re apart. The line between physical space and virtual will forever be blurred. We’ll start to see capabilities for global events to provide fully digitalized alternatives, beyond simple live streaming into full experiences. However, data privacy will have to be prioritized in order to create confidence among consumers. At the beginning of the pandemic we saw a lot in the news about concerns over the security of video conferencing companies. These concerns aren’t going anywhere and as digital connectivity increases, brands simply can’t afford to give users anything less than full transparency and control over their data. Very soon privacy and data-centric security will reach commodity status and the ability for consumers to protect and control sensitive data assets will be viewed as the rule rather than the exception. As awareness and understanding continue to build, so will the prevalence of privacy preserving and enhancing capabilities, namely privacy-enhancing technologies (PET). PET as a technology category will become mainstream and be a foundational element of enterprise privacy and security strategies rather than an add-on component integrated only to meet a minimum compliance threshold. While the world will still lack a global privacy standard, organizations will embrace a data-centric approach to security that provides the flexibility necessary to adapt to country / regional regulations and consumer expectations.

This month I complete 23 years of my professional service. Back in July 1997, I was told that deep expertise will lead to enhanced credibility, rapid job advancement, and escalating incomes. The alternative of being a generalist was dismissed as dabbling without really adding value. But how things have changed. In the new world, breadth of perspective and the ability to connect the proverbial dots (the domain of generalists) is likely to be as important as depth of expertise and the ability to generate dots (the domain of specialists). The rapid advancement of technology, combined with increased uncertainty, is making the most important career logic of the past counterproductive going forward. The world has changed, but our philosophy around skills development has not. Generalists have a set of tools to draw from, they are able to dynamically adjust their course of action as a situation evolves just like now when the world changed and is changing rapidly without allowing any time or opportunity to become a specialist.

By 2025, the lines separating culture, IT and health will be blurred. Engineering biology, ML and the sharing economy will establish a framework for decentralizing the healthcare continuum, moving it from institutions to the individual. Propelling this forward are advances in AI and new supply chain delivery mechanisms, which require the real-time biological data that engineering biology will deliver as simple, low-cost diagnostic tests to individuals in every corner of the globe. As a result, morbidity, mortality and costs will decrease in acute conditions, such as infectious diseases, because only the most severe cases will need additional care. Fewer infected people will leave their homes, dramatically altering disease epidemiology while decreasing the burden on healthcare systems. A corresponding decrease in costs and increase in the quality of care follows, as inexpensive diagnostics move expenses and power to the individual, simultaneously increasing the cost-efficiency of care. Inextricable links between health, socio-economic status and quality of life will begin to loosen, and tensions that exist by equating health with access to healthcare institutions will dissipate. From daily care to pandemics, these converging technologies will alter economic and social factors to relieve many pressures on the global human condition. #LockdownPerspectives