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One promise of the technology is that it’s a great equalizer. But the reality was not that simple.
The introduction of technology into more industries is a factor that has seleads to a division of the American workforce between promising jobs with good wages and low paying jobs with less opportunity for advancement. My colleague Ben Casselman recently wrote about the pandemic that has pushed more companies to use automation, which could kill jobs and erode bargaining power, especially for lower paid service workers. .
Remote working could widen the divide further if it persists as another legacy of the pandemic. Professionals with clerical jobs may have the opportunity to detach, at least part-time, from a physical workplace. But you can’t slaughter cattle, take care of children, or repave a highway with Zoom.
Apple has plans for a new pilot program that could show there might be a more democratic path to remote working. The company said it would experiment by letting its retail store employees work partly outside a store, Bloomberg News reported Last week. Even before the coronavirus, more and more customer service jobs were also shifted from remote call centers at least part of the time.
It’s an intriguing sign that technology could make the remote working option accessible to more than professionals, who make up a minority of America’s workforce. Just about one in six American employees worked remotely during the pandemic.
I recognize Apple might be an outlier and working for one of its retail stores is different from other types of in-person work. Employees at Apple stores can offer technical advice or manage online sales without being face to face with customers. It’s not as easy for people employed in most other retail jobs, or in healthcare, manufacturing, construction, and restaurants.
But one thing we need to take away from this pandemic is that it probably won’t be the last crisis that disrupts normal life. It’s good if more people, businesses, governments and technologists are now thinking about how to make it possible to do more activities temporarily online – not as a pleasure for the privileged few, but as a necessity for everybody.
It requires tackling America’s uneven and inefficient internet system and change it the state of mind of employers and employees regarding working outside the workplace. And that might require technologies to reinvent remote working for more types of workers. Schools were forced to go online in an emergency, and that didn’t go very well for a lot of people. But we may not have a choice if future pandemics, climate change-related forest fires or other emergencies disrupt school, work and life again.
The good news is that technology has jumped like this before – from professional classes to everyone. Computers were once confined to beige boxes on desks. Today almost every business and worker relies on technology in one form or another, for better and sometimes for worse.
To prepare for a future that may be marred by new crises that keep us apart, we need to focus on the technologies that allow people to go their separate ways and do the best we can online.
Tip of the week
It’s a bad time to buy a new phone
Unless you accidentally broke your phone during the holiday weekend celebrations, it might not be a good idea to buy a new smartphone right now. Brian X Chen, the consumer tech columnist for the New York Times, explains why.
Now is the best time to wait to buy a shiny new phone. Like clothing, tech products have seasonality. Businesses typically release major upgrades for their phones in the fall, before the holiday shopping season.
This means that if you bought the current model of iPhone 12 or Pixel 5 today, you might be disappointed in a few months when Apple and Google release the successors of these phones and cut the prices of previous models.
There are currently safer purchases. As a rule of thumb, anything that has been posted in the past six months probably shouldn’t be refreshed until next year. Apple usually releases new models of its tablets in the spring, for example, so now is a good time to buy a new iPad. But it might be better to wait as retailers often cut prices on shelves during Black Friday.
My advice: keep your credit cards in your wallet. In the meantime, you can review my column on how to extend the life of your tech by taking steps like installing a new battery, deep cleaning, and decluttering your data. You might end up completely changing your mind about buying something new.
Before leaving…
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The Chinese government is the boss. Didi, China’s large on-demand shopping company, has been pulled from app stores nationwide because China’s internet regulator has expressed concern about how the company has handled customer data. My colleague Ray Zhong writes that the orders affecting Didi and two other tech companies that were recently released in the United States show that Chinese authorities are taking the lead in business.
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Where there is a will (and money), there is a way: My colleague Erin Woo reports on start-ups that provide companies with technologies to make remote office jobs easier or more productive. A start-up makes an owl-shaped loudspeaker that replaces a remote worker in a meeting and automatically “zooms in on the person speaking.”
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Not all text snapshots on your phone are unnecessary. “If memories are what make us human, then our screenshots tell the story of who we are in the digital age,†writes Clio Chang for The New York Times Magazine.
Kisses to that
Amazing catch, kid! Thanks to an On Tech reader – Scott Lewis in Ellensburg, Washington – for suggesting this highlight of a recent baseball game in Pittsburgh. Learn more about this talented fan, Christian Gale, 11 years old.
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