Being Essential

Reading about Robotic Process Automation use cases for the pandemic made me think about increased adoption of RPA as a business continuity plan once this crisis is over. This crossed my mind while getting a glass of water to drink from my kitchen faucet. The personnel who run the water filtration plant are absolutely essential and continue to go to work as all of us who depend on them stay at home. If they were no longer able to come into work, society would fall apart instantly. It would make sense to automate just about everything possible with ability to operate remotely for this kind of service - to protect against such disaster. Yet, in doing so we would eliminate livelihood for those whose work has real and tangible value. 

For one thing this crisis had made clear who is essential in society and who is not. Truckers who keep the shelves of our grocery stores stocked are essential - there is no dispute there. A marketer trying to push customers to buy more of what they don't need is not. It would be a welcome societal shift if people were valued for their contribution to society - the healthcare professionals in the front-lines paying with their own lives to save us, everyone who keeps core infrastructure running - water, gas, electricity, sewer, waste collection, internet, phone service and many more. To that end, a good outcome from this crisis would be a focus on real value creation in society and aligning education and employment opportunities to it.