I’ve been thinking about the technologies we have and don’t have during this coronavirus situation, and which ones we don’t have that could make our lives easier if we had them. Also, which ones we were “supposed” to have by now if we are really living in the fabulous science fiction future.

In short, farming and manufacturing are relatively automated at this point, but transportation and many other industries closer to our daily lives are not. Computer technology is pretty far along, but it is not yet all that tied to the physical world. Take autonomous vehicles and drones. The food delivery situation during this shut down has not been all that great. Computers keep track of what goods are where and who is ordering what, but the actual deliveries are mostly done by people in diesel powered vehicles. Some of those people are sick, all are scared, and they have children home from school and are worried about family members just like the rest of us. We worry in normal times about robots taking our jobs, but this is a time when if we had reliable robot delivery, whether on the ground or through the air, it would help.

Biotechnology is just not as far along as we might have thought. The virus genome was sequenced quickly, but developing treatments and vaccines is still a painstaking process, and then making and administering them on a large scale is daunting. If we had really good computer models of human bodies, computers would be able to do trillions of drug and vaccine trials in the blink of an eye and figure out the combinations that work. We just don’t understand the physical body enough to represent it that well in a computer. So again, the computing is farther along than the physical world.

Teleconferencing and remote work has come a long way over the past decade or so. When I lived abroad between 2010-2013 and worked remotely with a team spread across three continents, the technology was expensive, unreliable, and really held us back. Now talking and screen sharing are pretty seamless, thanks to the cheap ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and speakers on our many devices. Data compression and internet connections have also made a big difference. We have some cheesy background images, but what we don’t have yet are the immersive virtual reality and augmented reality that we assume are eventually coming.