I know many of you are thinking about how the trend toward greater automation will be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In my own life, I have experienced an accelerated pace of technological change in the few months since the onset of the pandemic in the US. As a professor, I had to accelerate the move toward online teaching. Classes that were either fully on campus (one section of Global Trends in the Spring) or hybrid (like this summer's section) had to move to a fully online format. All our research seminars now take place via Zoom, which creates the potential to vastly increase the size of the audience (some predict this will create a "winner-take-all" academic market, where only the best scholars with the most compelling papers will attract any interest, the other speaking to empty virtual auditoriums). And we in academia are all learning to improve our remote work habits, using all the features of Zoom and Skype to best effects. It is fair to say that, as a result, my research productivity has surged since the beginning of the pandemic. Moreover, I have more time, because I no longer need to bother with offline distractions - travel, coffee with colleagues, PhD students barging into my office... (Just to clarify - I greatly value, and miss, those aspects of academic life - but they are gone for now, freeing up time to think, read and write).
Recently my colleague Nick Bloom showed that an astonishing 42% of the US workforce now works from home full-time. This is a change that will have profound consequences. It is unlikely to continue to the same degree once the pandemic is gone, but we are experimenting with new ways of producing value, and those innovations will surely have persistent effects.
Remote work is one aspect of the technological changes that COVID-19 has accelerated. Another is that the pace of automation and the speed of adoption of artificial intelligence are likely to accelerate. The WSJ has a great example today related to the meat packing industry.
UPDATE: A new NBER working paper takes a deeper look at the likely effect of COVID on automation.