When momentous events such as the coronavirus pandemic occur, it's tempting to conclude they'll change our lives forever. Even if we don't think it, you can be sure there'll be some overexcited journalists saying it. Just as there were after the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 in 2001.
Even then I was too old to believe it would "change our lives forever" and – although it did have lasting effects on international relations and our fear of terrorism – it didn't really.
This time people are telling us we'll all be working from home (with city office blocks and streets turning into ghost towns), doing our shopping online, learning online, seeing doctors online, and no longer doing business travel.
Somehow, I doubt it will be that radical. But I don't doubt there'll be change in all those directions. Most of them were already happening as part of the continuing digital revolution, and this will accelerate those trends.
The revolution's usual pattern is to bring modest benefits – greater "functionality" (machines that do more and better tricks) and convenience – to an industry's customers, while turning the industry on its head, with considerable disruption to the lives of many of its workers.
There was a time when watching television meant seeing only what the few available channels happened to be showing at the time. These days, recorders and catch-up apps and a multitude of free-to-air and for-the-small-fee channels and streaming video have given us vastly more choice.
This has meant huge upheaval for the industry, but improved our lives only to a small extent – something we've soon come to take for granted.
Some people (and not just Victorians) are finding it hard to imagine the pandemic will ever be over. But, though we can't be sure when, it will end. And when it does, far more aspects of the way we live and work will go back to the way they were than will change forever.
Truth be told, and unless we do a lot more to correct it, the biggest and baddest continuing effect of the pandemic will be on the careers of young people leaving education during the recession and what looks like being a long and weak recovery.
Staying serious, we can expect more concern about problems in health than in education. More concern about physical health than mental health. More concern about the problems of the old than those of the young.
Nothing new about any of that – except that Scott Morrison's heroic condemnation of those on his own side of politics suggesting that the lives of the elderly should have been "offered up" in the interests of the economy sits oddly with his and all federal politicians' tolerance of decades-long neglect and misregulation of aged care.
(As economists make themselves unpopular by pointing out, every time politicians decide to spare taxpayers the expense of fixing a level-crossing or in some other way saving "just one person" they are implicitly putting a dollar value on human life. They do so on our behalf and we rarely tell them to stop doing it. The term "cognitive dissonance" comes to mind.)
But I'm determined to keep it light this week, so on with happy chat about the pros and cons of new technology.
It's worth remembering that advances in digital technology have made the lockdown and social distancing tolerable – indeed, doable – in a way that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. Far more of us work as "symbolic analysts" (people who spend all day making changes on a screen) these days. Get access to all the office's programs on your laptop at home? Easy. Zoom to endless and unending meetings? Feel free.
The virus is likely to hasten technology-driven change because the crisis has broken through our fear of the new and unfamiliar. Both workers and bosses now understand both the pros and the cons of working from home relative to working from work.
We've tried buying groceries online. Doctors, departments of finance and patients have overcome their hang-ups about telemedicine. Online learning suits uni students better than school pupils.
But all these things do have their advantages and disadvantages. And most of the disadvantages are social. For the human animal, social distancing is a deeply unnatural act. We get a lot of our emotional gratification from face-to-face contact.
We communicate more efficiently and we learn things we wouldn't otherwise learn that help us do our job better. Relationships with suppliers, customers and consultants work better when we come to know and like each other.
So I think we'll do more digital remote working, but not turn our working lives over to it. Surveys show most people would like to work from home some days a week, but not all week. Business people may do less travel between capital cities – it could easily become the latest business cost-cutting fad – but it would be amazing if executives stopped wanting to shake hands with the people they deal with.
Technology can change what we do, but it won't change human nature.
