Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it's not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the nature of many of the remaining jobs has changed, as remote work becomes the norm. And in the midst of it all, automation has become potentially a threat to some workers and a salvation to others. In our upcoming special issue, titled "Automation and jobs in the new normal," we examine this tension and explore the good, bad, and unknown of how automation could affect jobs in the immediate and near future.

How will automation affect wages, and how will wages affect automation? The pace of automation depends on prices, not just technological feasibility. Just because a robot or algorithm can perform a task as competently as a human doesn't mean that human will be replaced. Automation depends on the cost of the technology relative to the cost of human labor. In today's tight labor market, for instance, rising wages and worker shortages might encourage automation and boost productivity.

We live in a world where productivity, a key pillar of long-term economic growth, has crumbled. In the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies, productivity growth has slowed so drastically in the past decade that economists debate whether we have entered a new era of stagnation--and this at a time when we need productivity growth more than ever to sustain growth, as working populations in countries from Germany to Japan age and shrink. Now comes potential help, in the form of advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which can already outperform humans in a range of activities, from lip-reading to analyzing X-rays. The performance benefits for companies are compelling and not just (or even mainly) in terms of reducing labor costs: automation can also bring whole new business models, and improvements that go beyond human capabilities, such as increasing throughput and quality and raising the speed of responses in a variety of industries. Automation will give the global economy that much-needed productivity boost, even as it enables us to tackle societal "moonshots" such as curing disease or contributing solutions to the climate change challenge.