Creating a Post-Covid Tech Future

Technology is the glue that holds our lives together. It has come into its own during the pandemic and will become even more important as efforts to battle health, economic and climate crises ramp up and we’ll need citizens to embrace a greater role for technology in their lives if these efforts are to be successful. The team at UNLIMITED Trends delve further.

Covid will be seen as technology's turning point 

Pre-Covid, tech arguably got a rough ride from the public. Consumers were apt to conveniently overlook their reliance on smartphones, their Netflix habits and their Amazon Prime deliveries, preferring instead to rail against tech like facial recognition, social media driven misinformation and intrusions into their privacy.

Covid certainly proved to be just as much of an opportunity for the tech sector as it was a crisis. The evidence is undeniable: Certainly, more people used more technology in more ways as a result of Covid:

• There was a surge in overall usage
• Social media and dating apps profited
• Streaming entertainment boomed
• The virtual office became reality
• Ecommerce grew in size and reach 

But, increases in usage were just the beginning. What is more crucial for the long-term perception of technology is the way that our relationship with technology evolved through the long days of lockdown. We came to see tech as a solution to our problems, though its ability to act in many roles:

Tech as protector, Tech as provider, Tech as informer, Tech as educator, Tech as enabler, Tech as connector, Tech as entertainer and others

The way that we turned to technology during Covid lockdowns may generate a change in public attitudes that will change the landscape of negativity forever.

Facing crises too big for humans alone to solve

We are unquestionably living in challenging times. And, though there is better news on the health front, there is every sign that the next few years will require huge Ingenuity and collective effort, In order to secure the future.

COVID + Brexit + Recession + Climate Change = an precedented combination of potentially existential threat to worldwide populations

There is no way that humans alone will be able to act in a co-ordinated and synchronised manner across these threats, without the intervention and assistance of technology to identify and implement solutions.

The World Economic Forum report 'Digital Transformation - Powering the Great Reset' issued last June focusses on a wide range of important topics including Sustainability, Economics, Healthcare and Digital Transformation and highlights that we now have a relatively narrow window of opportunity in which to leverage technology to reset the future.

Splendid UNLIMITED have used this report as the jumping off point for a series of 'Splendid Conversations' which look at the Retail, Finance, Healthcare and Housing sectors, to establish what each of the industries must do to create more accessible solutions, in order to keep up with the pace of digital acceleration.

Here, though, we look briefly at how tech can transform the way we deal with crises in health, economy and climate.

Tech and the HEALTH CRISIS

Tech can create healthier living by reducing infection, enabling remote lifestyles and telemedicine and facilitating treatments. More specifically, it can:

• revolutionise the processes behind treatment and the provision of care.

• enable remote solutions for diagnosis and care.

• optimise our new-found focus on hygiene, social distancing, and no-touch.

• underpin contact tracing efforts to reduce infections.

• enable efficient processes for the production, distribution and giving of vaccines.

• provide the “vaccine passports” that are needed to get some sectors back on their feet.


“We are seeing something that was played around with for a while and everyone thought was a nice idea and suddenly this forcing function of Covid-19 has truly pushed medicine into the digital era.” Dr. Jack Kreindler, CHHP & Mosaic Ventures, May 2020