I'd predict the opposite. The world will shortly have an international depression, and to the extent that businesses are allowed to be open, there will be 1000 applicants for every position. Wages will collapse. Demand for products generally will be low, dampened by the fact that a huge number of possible buyers are flat broke.
Those are conditions to retard the growth of automation, not increase it. You're going to spend a zillion dollars automating to produce a product people can't afford to buy while there are thousands of people outside your factory saying "we want to make your shit by hand for nearly free"?
Next couple of years will be a LOW time for automation, not a high time. (Which doesn't mean zero, obviously certain products are still going to be produced by increasingly cheap automated processes.) But some big surge in the rate of automation? No way.
I'd predict the opposite. The world will shortly have an international depression, and to the extent that businesses are allowed to be open, there will be 1000 applicants for every position. Wages will collapse. Demand for products generally will be low, dampened by the fact that a huge number of possible buyers are flat broke.
Those are conditions to retard the growth of automation, not increase it. You're going to spend a zillion dollars automating to produce a product people can't afford to buy while there are thousands of people outside your factory saying "we want to make your shit by hand for nearly free"?
Next couple of years will be a LOW time for automation, not a high time. (Which doesn't mean zero, obviously certain products are still going to be produced by increasingly cheap automated processes.) But some big surge in the rate of automation? No way.