In just a few months, billions of lives have been transformed. We’re now rethinking many facets of our daily lives, from work to travel to groceries. Some of those changes are temporary; others may prove lasting. So we asked experts: What’s one way life will be different in five years because of coronavirus? Their answers anticipate a world in which we’ll have to adapt as we feel out a new normal. —Alexandra Ossola, special projects editor
academia
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Professor of public policy at the Price School, University of Southern California
Read moreI hope and I believe that in five years, we will focus more on human relationships not stuff, the importance of all human beings and their rights, and the ways in which we can be a better society working together despite our differences.
Hany Farid
Professor, electrical engineering & computer science and the school of Information, University of California, Berkeley
Read moreIn five years, I expect us to have long since reached the boiling point that leads to reining in an almost entirely unregulated technology sector to contend with how technology has been weaponized against individuals, society, and democracy.
Adam Grant
Professor, organizational psychology, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Read moreMy bet is that movie theaters won’t exist.
Mauro Guillén
Professor, Wharton School; Author, 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything
Read moreThe shift towards remote work can potentially help better-educated senior citizens the most, enabling them to perform many jobs from the comfort of their homes or to participate in the so-called gig economy.
Amba Kak
Director (Global Programs), AI Now Institute, New York University
Read moreThe pandemic will demonstrate that digital tools should not be the default response to social crises.
Bruce Schneier
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
Read moreIf we want to be secure against these crises and more, we need to add inefficiency back into our systems.
Sarait Martinez & Seth Holmes
Indigenous Zapotec organizer in California and Chair of the Board of the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities (CBDIO); associate professor of medical anthropology and public health, University of California Berkeley
Read moreSociety will learn to treat farmworkers with gratitude and dignity.
Art & Design
Nabila Alibhai
Founder, inCOMMONS
Read moreArt and creativity will also help us redefine ourselves in the context of a new reality.
Benjamin Bratton
Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego
Read moreThe hour-by-hour quantification of the status of bodily fluids—heretofore the purview of diabetics and hypochondriacs—will be standard preoccupations of everyday life.
Joshua Citarella
Artist
Read moreGen Z’s identity formation is a series of taking positions on a crisis with explicit political consequences.
Hilary Cottam
Author, Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us & Revolutionise the Welfare State
Read moreIn a time of loss and deep suffering, new forms of spontaneous social infrastructure have emerged.
Keller Easterling
Director, Master of Environmental Design program, Yale University
Read moreCovid-19 is an X-ray of whiteness, inequality, and ineffectual government as well as a rehearsal for climate catastrophe.
Addie Wagenknecht
Artist
Read moreThere’s nothing profound in telling the truth, and we cannot afford to lose this time that we are capturing right now.
Forest Young
Global Principal and Head of Design, Wolff Olins, North America
Read moreAs the survivalist mentality wanes and job security becomes more relaxed, an occupational gratitude will give way to a meditation on that work which was worth dying for.
Business
Melissa Gregg
Chief technologist, User Experience and Sustainability for Client Computing, Intel
Read moreIn five years, many of us will still be working from office settings, but we will do so less often, with trepidation.
Anthea Kelsick
Co-CEO, B Lab US and Canada
Read moreThis is the time to build a new social contract between business and society, and to rebuild the economy in a more inclusive, equitable, and regenerative way.
Jill Krimmel
Interim president, Stubhub
Read moreIn a post-coronavirus world, virtual events and livestreaming will democratize live events, allowing for more people in more places to tune in to types of events that were previously unavailable to them.
Yannick Lefang
Founder, KASI
Read moreDigital will play a larger role in the way Africans live in five years because of coronavirus.
David McCourt
Founder and CEO, Granahan McCourt Capital; author, Total Rethink
Read moreIt can no longer be accepted that location determines your right to reliable, high-speed connectivity, which today is a vital utility.
Narayana Murthy
Founder, Infosys Limited
Read moreI hope the world accepts, adopts, and practices the safe, elegant and 4,000-year old Indian form of greeting—namaste (folding both the hands)—rather than touching elbows, which looks a little bit combative!
Steve Nygren
Founder and CEO, Serenbe
Read moreBe prepared to see entirely new planned communities pop up that are built with the intention of balancing the demand for open space with the need for urban amenities.
Sheryl Palmer
CEO and chair, Taylor Morrison Home Corporation
Read more‘Healthy homes’ will become increasingly prevalent as we are more aware of the way diseases are transmitted.
Steve Presley
Chairman and CEO, Nestlé USA
Read moreI think the increase in people eating at home will be one of the behaviors that sticks with us.
Minouche Shafik
Director, London School of Economics
Read moreI see three connected trends accelerated by the global coronavirus crisis—localization, digitalization, and socialization of risks.
Emmalyn Shaw
Managing partner, Flourish Ventures
Read moreWe’re seeing consumers move away from incumbent financial institutions in favor of challenger players that offer a faster pace of innovation, superior customer experience, and better affordability of service—particularly as we move toward a “no touch” economy.
Brooks Tingle
CEO & President, John Hancock Insurance
Read moreAs a result of the pandemic, I think life insurance will become dramatically easier to buy.
Sola Yomi-Ajayi
CEO, United Bank for Africa, America
Read moreIn five years’ time, our lives will be dominated by technology. The future is technology.
food
Soren Bjorn
President, Driscoll's
Read moreOne of the things that we very clearly believe has changed once and for all is online grocery shopping.
Jennifer Hill Booker
Chef
Read moreMy mission in a post-Covid world is to have my extended family not so extended.
David Lee
CFO, Impossible Foods
Read moreThe age-old technology of using animals for meat will continue to be replaced by more capable, efficient, and safer technologies like plant-based meat.
Government & nonprofit
Anousheh Ansari
CEO, XPRIZE
Read moreMeetings, doctor visits, even regular phone calls will benefit from massive advancements in VR/AR technologies.
Kathy Baughman McLeod
Director, Adrienne Arsht–Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center
Read moreWhile there is consensus that the coronavirus crisis has increased awareness of the many connections between climate and health, I predict that in five years, it will have set us back in tackling one of the major public health emergencies of our time: extreme heat.
Ian Bremmer
President, Eurasia Group
Read moreOne thing we can bet on is much more inequality… and coronavirus will play a significant part in that.
William Frey
Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program, The Brookings Institution
Read moreThe political clout these generations will generate should lead to more focused attention on racial justice and calls for greater government intervention toward reducing racial inequalities of all types.
John Goodwin
CEO, the LEGO Foundation
Read moreThis catalytic moment offers us a unique opportunity to reimagine how students learn and, in turn, adjust our education systems and models for the future.
Zia Khan
Senior vice president of innovation, The Rockefeller Foundation
Read moreOver the next five years, citizens will demand that the government set the goals for AI’s impact on society, but policymakers and technology companies will recognize that governments’ regulatory toolkit is ill-suited to the speed of AI development and the exponential growth of its applications in society.
Ai-jen Poo
Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance
Read moreThe pandemic (hopefully) has given us urgency to value and protect low-wage work in America in a whole new way.
Margrethe Vestager
Executive vice president, European Commission
Read morePeople will have realized that they can work remotely, that they don’t have to commute at least one or two days per week. The digital tools we will have to enable that will improve immensely, and I think we will enjoy it.
Health & Science
Satchit Balsari
Assistant professor, Global Health and Population, Harvard Chan School of Public Health
Read moreThe isolation and extreme hardship that has resulted from… the collective mismanagement of the virus will also result in a reckoning in which millions more will recognize the direct linkages between political participation—or the lack thereof—and its consequences.
Robin Berzin
Founder, Parsley Health
Read moreIn five years, I believe we’ll see a world where we’re both moving faster and more thoughtfully in the field of medicine.
Esther Choo
Associate Professor, Center for Policy & Research in Emergency Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University
Read moreThe next five years need to be a time of drastic reengineering of our systems and structures to eliminate health disparities and know that in crisis we have the ability to ensure that resources and care are allocated equitably.
Bill Nye
Science educator and television personality
Read moreWith the development of a vaccine in the next five years, enough people will be immune to the Covid-19 virus that people will largely have put this pandemic behind them.
Kate Ryder
Founder and CEO, Maven Clinic
Read moreTelemedicine will be fundamental to how healthcare is delivered, and it may look different than the telemedicine model we’re familiar with today.
media
Yolanda Edwards
Founder, Yolo Journal
Read moreThe way in which we travel, and think about traveling, has changed, and I’m sure this will be long-term.
Ben Ehrenreich
Journalist and author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
Read moreIn just its first few weeks, the pandemic—and even the wealthiest governments’ failure to respond to it—made all the fault lines, injustices, and inequalities that define our societies impossible to ignore.
Cindy Gallop
Founder and CEO, MakeLoveNotPorn
Read moreWe are going to bring our values to bear on who deserves to be enriched, because of how much they have enriched us all through their work and their care when nothing else mattered.
Bill McKibben
Author, educator, and activist
Read moreI think the world’s major cities will be far more bikeable—and as a result there will be lots more people biking.
P.W. Singer
Author of Burn-In: A Novel of the REAL Robotic Revolution
Read moreThe forces of AI and automation will be drastically sped up by the response to the pandemic.
tech
Tim Berners-Lee
Founder, World Wide Web; founding director, World Wide Web Foundation; CTO, Inrupt
Read moreThinking about my life—be it day-to-day family life, my work, my music, my play, my volunteering with organizations—it’s all, in fact, data. It is data I control. It all connects together.
Amanda Bradford
Co-founder and CEO, The League
Read moreIn five years, people will prefer to meet online first before meeting in person.
Karen Chupka
EVP, CES
Read moreOne of the things all this experimentation has led to is that people will be willing to try new things.
Harley Finkelstein
Chief operating officer, Shopify
Read moreIn many ways, social distancing and stay-at-home orders have leveled the playing field for business owners.
Tricia Wang
Co-founder, Sudden Compass
Read moreWe will no longer rely on governments or markets alone to take care of us. Instead we will rely on ground-up, hyperlocal neighborhood networks to get stuff done in times of crisis.