Hello and welcome to the World Ahead on Economist Radio. I'm Tom Standich, Deputy Editor

of the Economist. In this Future Gazing Podcast series, we consider provocative prophecies

and speculative scenarios to gain a different perspective on the present. In this episode,

we'll be examining how the coronavirus pandemic could accelerate the development and adoption

of new technologies. Coming out of this, you could certainly see something like short

haul flights could be disrupted by this because I as a consumer no longer want to take that

mass transportation option. There's an extended accumulation of experimentation and technology

that then be brought into the economy in these urgent periods.

The COVID-19 crisis is changing how people use technology, but which of those changes

will stick and which technologies stand to benefit as they become more widely used. Before

we look forward, though, I want to take you all the way back to 1815.

In April that year, Mount Tambora, a volcano in what is now Indonesia, exploded in one

of the largest eruptions in recorded history. A vast plume of dust and ash spread around

the world, blocking out the sun and reducing global temperatures and causing what came to

be known as the Year Without Summer. Crops failed in China, the summer monsoon was delayed

in India and in North America a dry fog reddened the sun. It even snowed in the summer in

New York. In Europe, riots and looting broke out as the wheat, oat and potato harvest

failed. Food prices soared and tens of thousands of people died from famine and disease. Thousands

of horses also starved or were slaughtered as the high price of oats forced people to

choose whether to feed their horses or themselves. All of which prompted Carl von Dries, a German

inventor, to devise a personal transport machine to replace the horse, a two-wheeled wooden

contraption called the Lauf machine, which literally means running machine. But over the

...