Hong Kong — The Covid-19 crisis is accelerating a technology boom that has the potential to boost productivity across much of the world, spurring growth even in mature economies such as those of Europe and the US.
This could translate into increases in GDP per capita, ranging from about $1,500 in Spain to about $3,500 in the US, according to the report’s authors. The opposite appears to be happening during this pandemic. Three-quarters of the almost 1,400 executives surveyed by McKinsey in December expected investment in new technologies to pick up in 2020-24, compared with 55% that increased outlays in 2014-19.
John Ha, founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, a Redwood City, California, start-up that is backed by SoftBank, says his autonomous robots can perform tasks like ferrying food and dirty dishes between a restaurant kitchen and the dining area, allowing human staff to interact more with their customers.Bear’s Servi bot has already been deployed at Denny’s restaurants in Japan and at food concessions at Houston’s Toyota Centre arena that are managed by Levy Restaurants.
“The obvious thing is there will be lots of adoption of automation,” Bloom says. “But I think less obvious is we are going to see a big change of direction towards making work-from-home remote connectivity much more powerful.”
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