Scenario: How will our lives change if the pandemic lasts for years?
Thank you to students in the Future of Media classes, Summer and Fall 2021, for elements of this scenario adapted from their final presentations.
Scenarios of 2030: I teach a scenario course in which students create alternative stories of the next few years, to help us anticipate changes and make better decisions now. This series of posts is part of the prep for that class. The point is to suggest some driving forces that could affect our world in unexpected ways, and explore how they might play out.
The pandemic lasts for years
It is 2030. We’ve been living with Covid for 11 years. Though machine intelligence has expanded at an exponential rate, and is regularly applied to develop vaccines, tests and treatments, the variants are too fast for it. They proliferate through wild animals, like minks, deer and bats. There are rumors of rogue laboratories. Lockdowns have proven unenforceable, public health authorities are mistrusted, and the only safe option is retreat.
There has been a great resettlement. Some people have moved to villages with satellite-based broadband, often close to their original families. Others live in tiny urban apartments, typically installed with one wall or more devoted to a videoscreen. Wherever they live, people ration their physical contact with others. Most work, schooling, and play takes place through the wall. People will still meet outside, or spend time in nature, but they do not travel or congregate in crowds, because the risks are too high.
This change took place with remarkable speed. The pandemic surges, fires, floods, and heat waves of the mid-20s led to mass migrations, with climate refugees, viral refugees, war refugees and families resettled all at once. Housing construction prices dropped with the acceptance of modular forms and new materials. Supply chains reconfigured themselves with robotics and automation. Walmart and Amazon opened their first mini-factory stores in 2024, using digital fabrication to create a growing number of products on site.
Our closest friends may live thousands of miles away. We will never see them in person. Many of us have stopped caring; virtual travel is so rich. Our children may never know what it is to step on a plane.
The message of this scenario is: People adapt, and we should prepare to be responsive. In this post-Covid metaverse world, there is no need for much money. Investors seek net-zero results as much as financial returns, because humanity is waiting for the overall global temperature to cool. We know that will probably take until 2060, and no one knows how nature may respond. Similarly, no one knows when or if the virus will be overcome. Humanity has not killed human civilization or the natural environment. We have just put it into an uncertain way of life, where for most people, the only certainties are in the metaverse.
