Winning from the pandemic big tech firms are making gains is the coronavirus is taking its toll worldwide many are hiring while millions of people are being laid off so whats driving this boom in this time of crisis this is inside story. Hello and welcome to the program today with me we are no longer physically shopping or eating in restaurants and a flight to one of the worlds favorite destinations is now just a dream the measures were taking to save our lives during the coronavirus pandemic disrupting businesses around the world but staying at home with their only windows to the outside world being a wife i connection and a device is changing our Consumption Habits and benefiting the big Major Tech Companies we are buying groceries medicines and pet food online were working and learning online were replacing traveling by surfing online you get where were going with this Tech Companies are thriving amazon alone hiring 100000 new staff zune video web site youve heard of is now believed to be worth 44000000000. 00 lets get an idea of how much were now relying on technology that will sales of over the counter medicine for colds rose 9 fold on amazon in the United States during the month to mid march from the year earlier. Downloads of netflix sees video jumped 66 percent in italy alone whatsapp the messaging service and voice calling service has doubled its traffic in volume the number of users on microsofts teams messaging application has grown by 37 percent in one week to more than 44000000. 00 users per day i phone app sales in the u. S. Recently have risen by 20 percent and android sales by 14 percent. Ok lets bring in our guest joining us today from new york we have john biggs hes an editor at desk a Digital Currency and Financial Technology website from vienna we have mark hes a professor at the university of vienna and a member of the european commissions expert group on Artificial Intelligence in the netherlands we have nolan gertz hes a technology ethicist and a professor at the university of twente welcome to you all jump in new york coming to you 1st whos doing well here and why. Doing well considering im basically still my pajamas and havent had a haircut in about 3 weeks is not me exactly. In terms of technology in terms of the technologies that were using right now were seeing a lot of the things that were promised come to fruition unfortunately its under duress and its under and its under. A great deal of pain right now but a lot of the Networks Networking effect that were promised by the internet are actually coming to be combated will mark in vienna are we talking here about trends that are being accelerated trends that were going to happen anyway so its like a a quick cook on something. Well yes because there was a really kind of digitalization process happening where burke and alliance were already very much many years of buying by electronic Digital Technologies and now of course because of the crisis through theres also increasing. So its interesting to see whats going to happen unfortunately the ethical problems are also you know increasing and on the table now things to do with privacy dangerous the that are there are works of art. So that we see as well no one gets in and say this is good news clearly thought people let you cheap and netflix who is it bad news for yeah i would say this is bad news right now for small competitors who wanted to try to be different. As they can pay for example the educational sector with. Becoming immediately the standard in this that almost any other Video Conferencing platform that wanted to actually focus on. As happened for example when competitors of facebook wanted to focus on private they had a kind of lose out to the name brand and because of how fast they were being pushed to move online if again push towards name recognition when the day jump exe in new york coming in you know jim jams john did this come along at precisely the right time for netflix of clearly their p. R. People would never be tone deaf enough to say that anywhere publicly or even email each other about it but netflix is success is built on massive amounts of debt. Sure but i mean if you if you want to call if you want to call that sort of investment in debt it basically opens up a. It opens up an entirely new world of streaming to streaming opportunities for netflix for folks like hulu especially in the u. S. Youre not its not just netflix if anybody lost out i think it might be disney disney. Disney is offering all of its movies and things but its not offering fresh content so sure the kids are going to stare at Little Mermaid all day but theyre not going to but the parents are going to want to re up when this is over. And but it also points to a different a different view of a different way of tristrem in video were basically pumping constant content into peoples homes now in ways that we never could before it used to be ace a cable stream where you have a channel that just kept on going and going whereas now you have you have a pineapple of things that you could have access to public interrupting you there john its one state that point to know them in and day the can the Global Infrastructure cope moving forward because if so many more people working from home they then go from working at home in front of a bookshelf usually as far as im aware then they go to the Kitchen Table they put on their i pad or they get their i pad to talk to their big speakers so they can stream radio to listen to the news and then they go online and Start Talking to people around the world. What is interesting to think about how we already talk about the idea that were online so much that it feels like we never lives anywhere else anymore because for example in the release of i think its pronounced quite be quick be yesterday and netflix that was going to offer 10 minute shows with the idea that i need to be able to watch content constantly even just walking from my house to the bus stop and then from the bus stop to work so i get this idea that we see as an advertisement all the time where people are being presented staring at their phones to the detriment of reality and this is seen not as a mark against the companies but actually the selling point where increasingly and living in a world thats crushing around you why would you want to look at anything except fantasy on your phone. Can you develop for us your ideas or your worries about the way that potentially he could certain governments will certain say home ministries tilt from being aware of what were doing to recording what were doing to observing what were doing and it would be an easy pivot for them to make to go down that road and get on the bus towards being authoritarian. Thats definitely a danger i must say not only with rich governments but also we with big corporations. As we you know as we know but when it comes to governments i was surprised how easy it is. You know using the argument of cries us to to take measures that normally only are taken in a in a mockery darian kind of environment and how easy people accept these measures. Also i think you know the technologies we have today that are very powerful Artificial Intelligence or kind of Smart Technologies are very powerful tools to to do to us to increase surveillance so theres definitely a risk there and i think in these times we come very well aware of that. And we should really make sure that next time youre better prepared for this kind of discussions on top of that jump exe in new york there are kind of trust issues there out there as well because the technology is so good and so user friendly but you could end up in a situation where someones watching you watching someone else and if you talk about zoom very specifically about zoom there are Security Issues with that particular platform and unless you get those security proxies set up properly when you download that app you could potentially be in a lot of trouble. I mean i think my my view is that everyones going to be naked on the internet for 15 minutes in the future its the its the old. Hadfield anywhere hall. Yarn so i think were in a position right now where were trying to figure out how these things are going to be in are a great in our lives we used to zoom every day anyway before this now we use it now our kids are using it which is a little bit more a little bit more distressing. In terms of this becoming a command and control system. Potentially but one of the things i like to say is the internet routes around damage if we ever got to a position where yeah were getting were getting poor information were all being forced to stay inside be because of some invisible threat the internet probably would route around that information and give us the give us the real dope on force that that leads to conspiracy theories all the other good stuff so were were really bringing a lot of things to a head its as you said it was a fast cook to get a lot of the things in front of people that may or may not have had access to this before 80 year olds are using zoom my mom is trying to get a polish television sent to her her laptop something that she never thought that she ever wanted to have but now of a sudden it seems like a good idea because she has nothing else to do does that mean however joan when youll mother what shes post is television does that mean that the advertisers are making money or not because at the ties in revenue within this this paradigm for some people has fallen off a cliff but other people is going through the roof. Definitely in this specific case the advertisers are probably making money theyre still advertising polish products to a polish diaspora who may or may not want to go out to the polish store down the street especially if you live in new york you can kind of get that. Whereas on twitter and a number of other places theyre not advertising does doesnt make any sense to advertise primarily because nobody has any cash to advertise right so on on twitter youre going to notice a lot of far fewer advertisements. The most i ever saw the biggest advertisement i saw recently was for quickie and thats because they raised 2000000000. 00 for this for this goofy project that they have and they launched at exactly the wrong time because people want of ease into this sort of content as opposed to just jump into it as theyre being forced to do theres so much other stuff that they could be doing right now versus and there and a lot of people arent on the subways either so its kind of silly for them to try to launch right now. Well see how that goes and gets an end today coming back to you for a 2nd for the people whove the Legacy Companies the facebooks the twitter the what saps and what have you not the companies that do similar jobs in other parts of the world but the companies that want to make money and have made a lot of money historically is there a supply and demand question for them yes the supply and demand clearly but the supply routes have been cut or interrupted by covert 19 by by the fact that people cannot buy literally the hardware because the planes cannot fly the cargo from a to b. For example into a country like china where youve got that umbrella effect of us quite quite or thora tarion government anyway is there a gets around for the companies that want to make money or not yeah i think when youre talking about Entertainment Companies there are certainly happy to supply you with. Endless amounts of mindless version thats been around for decades as we can see with h. B. O. For example suddenly releasing an entire library for free and you get the feeling that its almost like a drug dealer trying to give you a taste to get you hooked for when they do move back to a proprietary model and it is if youre thinking about also you know like amazon other Similar Companies that are focused on delivery that theyre ramping up their people theyre basically the only ones who are hiring right now so that basically have the workforce is doing the looking from one sector theyre getting sucked up into em so while at the same time more and more people are becoming dependent on their product theyre also becoming dependent on it for their income mark in vienna could this lead to a long lasting change the simplest things according to commerce i. Q. Dog food toilet paper the sales of those globally have gone up by a factor of 13 so in 6 months or a year why go round your big local supermarket to buy dog food and toilet paper when you can just do one click shopping and it turns up on your doorstep 24 hours later. Yeah i mean probably the local think so groceries and perhaps the thought of going to stay local but it is sort of many people find out now or. A lot of things can be ordered online so just in terms of you know winners and losers does definitely. These companies are going to be under on the winning side of this story whos going to be on the winning side when it comes to people like google and microsoft for you john briggs in new york i mean there those 2 companies are drowning in money theyre drowning in big fat Bank Accounts and yet still they feel the need to offer discounted rates to quotes new customers does that kind of go down the road of yes its what nolan was saying you know its kind of a crack dealer saying try this stuff its really good oh and by the way when you come back next week its doubled in price. Sure well i mean thats thats fairly common in Silicon Valley thats sort of the cost of the total cost of ownership for a for a customer to grab a customer costs quite a bit but once you have them once you have nabbed theyre going to stay there forever. There are some startups that Like House Party for example it got suddenly got pretty popular and there are a whole cost per customer is fairly low because people just sign up its sort of viral amazon is going to be the winner here or Something Like a walmarts going to be a loser mom and pop stores are going to be losers restaurants are going to be are going to change the way they work. The question was does the world change after this i think the i think there is a i think the general acceptance of online work from home online schooling that we didnt have before thats going to happen but i dont think that bars and restaurants are going to let themselves get taken down so easily and i think theres going to be a situation where a lot of the hygiene and a lot of things that we forgot about over the years is going to come back and improve and were going to want to leave our homes at least for this summer i think itll be a summer of love quote unquote if you want to call it that but were definitely on a go back in front of the screens and i think a lot of companies are actually going to say hey we dont have to spend. 2008010100000 dollars on this on this office when all we have to do just give people laptops and let em go. And i think thats going to be a really really big change globally will we maybe no one good get sick and tired of not surveillance capitalism but what it might become you know surveillance capitalism on steroids in as much as if i engage with a picture on my instagram of say workout equipment funnily enough 12 hours later this happened to me 2 days ago i get hit with adverts full by this gym equipment because you cant go to your gym so some algorithm some place engages with me engaging with Something Else and if were all buying and shopping and doing stuff online youre going to get hit with page after page after page of this stuff right and i think this is really my main concern is the degree to which weve just become accustomed to this part of everyday life and what we really need to be worried about is this concept of what we think of as normal and right now things are abnormal and theyre going to be sort of the bedrock for whats becoming normal afterwards so now that we are for example teaching Classes Online and students are increasingly expected to be taught by their parents you can imagine that this will become seen as sort of a go to model that is always in the background so for example if there are disputes labor disputes in the future this can be held over that we know that we can simply hire and replace people with videos they can fire a place before their parents we can just mentioning close out entire offices if we need to we can have remote offices we could have entire Industries Run by other countries as weve been doing more and more with Customer Service so i think it is very worrying what right now is seen as sort of a salvage for a Current Crisis might come back to hurt us in the near future. Mark in vienna i guess what were talking about here as well is the people who will survive this migration across to all these new platforms its about them monetizing information for their financial benefit but if youre ingesting information at this rate all the time on your i pad on your phone on your device on your talk to something on the garden window ledge say and it hears your voice and you say do something and it does it isnt there a chance that you also ingest disinform ation and fake news also is multiplied exponentially you know that that certainly youre doing sure. Now on the positive sign it is that does this whole situation can be seen as a gigantic social experiment where we try out how is it when we when we replace face to face contact with all these these technological ways of doing things and i think it also gives us an opportunity to reflect what is this Technology Place should district norms you have in our lives how do i deal with fake news for example. How can people be supported in india on which big news what was the role of the media there so i think its also an opportunity to to reflect and to to take some some some action to to mitigate these these effects john in new york we kind of touched on this already briefly which industries which professions can move over can migrate and im also thinking particularly right now you cant have the doctors and the nurses being replaced by Artificial Intelligence not yet because if youre in a situation where every hospital around the world is in effect an i. C. U. Ward a massive i. C. U. Ward you still need those specialists. Cardiologist the specialists the nurses you know in i. C. U. To keep you alive i think and feel i think fortunately i think at this point its unable were able to replace those with ai robotics. Lets go back to the industry question 1st the industry question is who wins here knowledge workers as you said call centers and he said programmers designers that sort of thing and the the divide between the knowledge worker and i guess the wetwork or the physical worker is going to become even bigger given that a receptionist isnt needed anymore to manage the office you lose a lot of these these lower paying jobs that were great for people with a little bit less education were going to be sitting there on and doing the doing quote unquote menial work which is vital for an office but is not vital for a ferrari. Online presence in terms of doctors in terms of in terms of actual physical interaction with patients thats going to take a minute i do see a day in the near future i talk to a lot of futurists and i talk to a lot of roboticists and you see a day in the near future where a robot robot comes in and. A robot comes in and lifts patients off of beds takes care of patients that sort of thing and were at that point now but i think we need a much lighter touch right now and that unfortunately puts doctors and nurses in a danger. Well see well see how it all see how it works knowing sin and today the Tech Companies were inviting them into do it as well they are in twining themselves through in underneath around a law eaves when all this settles down and maybe goes back to not the old normal but a new version of the old normal how many of us will actually start pulling cables out of the wall and go on and on plumbing all this stuff. It is interesting to think about how before all this you might have said that there is still a dominant feeling. Of technophobia that its sort of keeping Tech Companies from encroaching too much into our lives and i wonder if now after coronavirus were going to move to so they more like him for a phobia or the sort of germ a phobia on steroids d have increasing concern about even with doctors. Physical contact of any kind in the same way that we are moving away from you know going to stores towards and this on to then going away from delivery workers to having amazon drones you can imagine that increasingly youre going to have on the one hand people who get more and more techno feel like more and more in love with technology i dont the other hand i think youre going to have pushback but probably from a increasing minority. Decreasing minority of the population where youre going to have a call to stick with what we can trust with each other a call for solidarity a return to nature ok im going to stop you there in 20 seconds seconds mark the industry calls it blitz scaling growing up full costs so is good for the industry in 20 seconds on some of this is a good for us. Well its not going to be good for us if we just keep using all these products without reflection without being critical without thinking what do we really want and i think it can be good for us if we manage to do you know shape our lives take control of this and also politically to to have a kind of Governance Framework at all kind of levels also globally that steps down some rules because otherwise were going to be in trouble ok gentlemen we have to leave it there many thanks to i guess they were john big smock and nolan guts and thank you too for your company you can see the program again any time via our website aljazeera dot com and for further discussion go to our Facebook Page thats facebook dot com forward slash a. J. Inside story can also join the conversation on twitter at a. J. Inside story or tweet me im at peta dont be one for me peter tell me and the team here in doha thanks for watching i will see you very soon for the moment. Crossing borders breaking boundaries recording injustice fighting inequality from africa and asia to europe and use exile as a word more i mean overstreet every very grown up for me is one country aljazeera world meets for refugees whove come to your touched peoples lives and made a difference. The hard road from home photographers and activists on aljazeera. Holding the powerful to account as we examine the u. S. Sees world in the world on aljazeera. 0. Im Richelle Carey youre watching the news hour which will be dominated by our coverage of the corona virus and. Its hell of a search in france pushing the countrys total death toll beyond 10000. 00. And new high for death rates in the u. S. At the center but there are further signs that new york states outbreak is nearing its peak. Theres one thing i know about this point is to