Why We Must ‘Uberise' Faster

We can either resist it and wonder where jobs vanished, or tailor it to our needs

- R Jagannathan

On the other side of the Covid-19 crisis, after we find a vaccine and, hopefully, a quick return to growth, it can never – never – be business as usual. Even though business leaders have been loosely talking about a “new normal” post-COVID, this normal isn’t really “new”. It’s been with us for more than a decade.

Ask yourself, which of these phenomena wasn’t visible in January this year, when the world had barely heard of the virus: powerful technology platforms, shared mobility, the widespread use of robots and artificial intelligence in manufacturing and services, increasing contractualisation of work (aka gigs), and free or near-free digital services (mail, maps, apps, new blogs, virtual money)?

About the only thing that seems relatively new is working from home (WFH), even though this had already begun creeping in much earlier (eg Lijjat papad, or garment stitching). What COVID has done is mainstream a fringe trend like gig work in a technology-mediated world. Covid accelerated previous trends; what might have taken a decade to play itself out has now been achieved in a matter of months. We have nowhere to hide.

The economy is being “uberised” (you could call it google-ised or amazonite or jio-ised, if you so prefer), where the middle function in most economic activity – the task of bringing buyer and seller together or communicating from top to bottom and vice versa – has been taken over by technology.