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The Post-Covid/Digital Changing World

For many, COVID and the post-COVID period have been interpreted as an interruption or a pause. They were neither. They represent a transition from an old to a new world. As we have now come to realise, the world so many are waiting to return to is not quietly sitting on the other side of the pandemic, waiting to be resumed. It has been overtaken. A different world has already begun to consolidate itself beneath our feet, and much of the anxiety of the present comes from the fact that millions of people are still trying to interpret a changed age with habits formed in a dying one. Many countries, industries, institutions, organisations, groups, and individuals that did not see this change coming, or, worse, remain delusional about a return to the old order, are now having their own ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment, and we wish them well.

That is why so many people feel disoriented. They are not merely tired. They are out of sync. There are now, in effect, two worlds living side by side. One still longs for restoration: the office as the unquestioned centre of work, the classroom as the uncontested site of authority, the old media order as the primary gatekeeper of truth, the degree as a settled marker of competence, and the institution as the force that sets the pace of life. The other world has already moved on. It works through platforms, learns through networks, trades in speed, delegates tasks to machines, and increasingly treats AI not as novelty, but as infrastructure.

Change, Before It Has a Name

This is what social change looks like before it has fully announced itself. It first appears as an inconvenience. Then as confusion. Then as tension. Only later, when it hardens, does it acquire a name. People begin to notice that a new tool, such as electricity, the Internet or AI, is no longer optional, but necessary; that new skills are rewarded faster than schools can teach them; that institutions are rewriting rules simply to keep up; and that older authorities are losing their monopoly over information, legitimacy, and pace. When these things begin happening together, a society is no longer merely adapting. It is being reorganised.

More than three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History that beneath the flow of events, there are moments when “something very fundamental” is happening in world history, and that what matters is the larger process giving coherence to the headlines, not merely the headlines themselves. His great insight was that history does not move only through material shocks, but through shifts in consciousness, in ideas, and in the very frameworks through which people understand political and social life. That proposition feels newly relevant.

Since 2020, the evidence of such shifts has been difficult to ignore: UNESCO says the pandemic disrupted education for more than 1.6 billion learners, forcing societies to rethink what a classroom is and where learning happens; the OECD notes that COVID-era physical-distancing measures forced many firms to introduce telework on a large scale, altering assumptions about presence, productivity, and the location of serious work; WHO warned that the pandemic was accompanied by an “infodemic,” an overabundance of information, including false and misleading information, that made truth itself harder to establish in public life; and UNCTAD found that online retail sales’ share of total retail sales rose from 16% in 2019 to 19% in 2020, signaling a deeper shift in everyday expectations about speed, convenience, and digital mediation. These were not merely technical adjustments. They were signs that people were beginning to think differently about work, authority, trust, and the architecture of daily life.

That insight matters now, even if the world has moved beyond the confidence of that earlier moment. For the present, upheaval is not driven by a new global ideology in the old sense. It is driven by the collision between technological acceleration and institutional lag. History did not end. It changed gear. The contradiction of our age is not simply between Left and Right, capitalism and socialism, or democracy and authoritarianism. It is between the speed at which technology is transforming everyday life and the slower pace at which institutions, norms, and human beings can absorb that transformation. The next layer of evidence is already visible in AI itself: Stanford’s 2025 Global AI Index reports that 78% of organisations were using AI in 2024, while McKinsey’s latest global survey puts the figure at 88% in 2025. Inconsistencies aside, both figures represent more than adoption. It is a sign that the frameworks through which people understand knowledge, judgment, authorship, productivity, and even human capability are being revised in real time.

Change at Pandemic Speed: Why Change Feels Like Disorder

COVID-19 did not create this from scratch. It accelerated it. Remote work did not begin in 2020. Digital commerce did not begin in 2020. Online learning, platform dependence, algorithmic culture, the erosion of traditional gatekeepers, and the broad digitisation of life were all underway before the pandemic. But COVID compressed years of adoption into months. It forced firms, schools, governments, households, churches, universities, and media systems to cross thresholds they might otherwise have approached slowly, cautiously, and unevenly. Once crossed, those thresholds did not simply disappear.

That is why so many institutions now seem brittle. The teacher who once stood securely at the centre of the classroom must now compete with YouTube, TikTok, and ChatGPT, and is being pushed toward a new role: not merely transmitting information but teaching judgment. The office worker who once proved seriousness by physical presence is now judged through screens, platforms, deliverables, and AI-assisted workflows. The journalist who once worried mainly about speed must now prove that the image is real, the voice is human, and the video has not been synthetically generated. The small business owner who once relied on location and foot traffic is now told that sales, service, marketing, payments, and reputation all live online.

That is why, for many, social change is usually disruptive before it becomes clarifying. It unsettles identity before it creates a new normal. It breaks routines before it creates new literacies. It produces anxiety before it produces competence. It destabilises authority before it produces new forms of leadership. It confuses values before it establishes a new moral language. It fragments trust before it forces new systems of verification. It widens exclusion before it creates pressure for new inclusion. It exposes institutional weakness before it compels institutional redesign. And in doing so, it divides people into two camps: those trying to restore the old world, and those beginning to learn the grammar of the new one.

History is rarely kind to the first camp. Not because they are foolish. Not because caution is wrong. But because large structural changes do not usually reverse once technology, behaviour, and incentives begin to align. Once a new way of living becomes embedded in work, communication, learning, and commerce, nostalgia ceases to be a strategy. It becomes delayed.

There is precedent for this. After the Spanish flu and the First World War, societies did not simply return to what they had been before 1914. The 1920s became an era of urban expansion, cultural experimentation, technological spread, mass consumption, looser social codes, and new forms of public life. Beneath the surface of glamour and novelty lay something deeper: an uneven renegotiation of social norms, trust, authority, and institutional legitimacy. Ours is not the same age, but it has the same signature: a society trying to stabilise itself after shock, while the deeper foundations of everyday life are being rearranged.

AI and the new logic of change

And now comes artificial intelligence, not as a side story, but as the newest general-purpose force multiplying all the others. Steam changed production. Electricity changed scale and time. Computing changed information and coordination. AI is beginning to change cognition itself. That is why this moment feels so intimate. The change is not only happening in factories, firms, schools, and ministries. It is happening inside the habits of thought by which people search, write, compare, analyze, judge, create, and decide.

This is also why so many are resisting. Some are overwhelmed by the pace. Some are professionally threatened by the revision of competence. Some are institutionally defensive because admitting the scale of the change would require redesigning long-settled systems. But a university that thinks banning AI is a complete strategy is not defending excellence. It is confusing discomfort with wisdom. Any government, organisation, institution, group or individual that treats digital change and particularly AI as a peripheral issue is not being prudent. It is misreading history.

This is not an abstract issue for Jamaica, or, for any other small developing country. In states where growth, jobs, education, tourism, public administration, and national reputation are all increasingly mediated by digital systems, failing to understand the present transition is not a philosophical mistake. It is a developmental risk. Countries that do not appreciate talent, its innovative and intelligent assets, invest in digital literacy, AI literacy, adaptive governance, public-sector capability, and new systems of trust and verification will not merely lag technically. They will lose control over the terms on which their futures are negotiated.

Learning to Change

So, the task before us is not to celebrate every novelty, nor to surrender uncritically to every technological wave. It is to see clearly. To recognise that what feels like chaos is, in part, a struggle between inherited institutions and altered realities. To understand that many of the tensions now filling workplaces, schools, politics, media, and families are not random. They are signals. They tell us that the world has shifted, and that those who still imagine they are waiting out a temporary disturbance may in fact be standing still while history moves past them.

The real danger now is not change. It is misrecognizing change. It is mistaking transition for interruption. It is clinging to a world that has already been reorganised. It is calling structural transformation a phase and then wondering why everything feels strange.

The good news is that many people are already adapting, and some are thriving. Businesses are reorganising workflows around digital tools. Workers are upskilling in data, cybersecurity, and AI-assisted productivity. Educators are beginning to teach with these tools rather than pretending students live outside them. And policymakers are slowly recognising that the next industrial phase cannot be about efficiency alone. That is precisely why Industry 5.0 matters as a phrase: it signals that resilience, human well-being, and sustainability are becoming central to the next chapter of production and development. Jamaica is not outside this story.

The recent SALISES Jamaica GenAI Readiness Study: A National Survey of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices, conducted between November and December 2025, and to be launched next month, suggests that about 76 per cent of respondents have used AI at least once (primarily youth and younger adults), in some form or another, while roughly 24 per cent are not. Quantitatively, this is a good sign.

However, qualitatively, the study also found that the 24 per cent included many mature professionals in decision-making circles at various levels across multiple industries in Jamaica. This is another form of digital divide, which inevitably raises questions about whether enough of those occupying senior positions, or making decisions about social, economic, and business life across institutions, are adapting quickly enough to the new technological reality. If not, they will need to widen their pathways into it quickly, intelligently, and fairly, before the new common sense hardens and leaves too many behind.

For those who don’t want to be left behind, deliberate learning is the key, and AI should be one of the first tools that you MUST embrace, as it now embodies this new world. And, although learning how to use AI is important, learning how to create something using AI will be even more indispensable for your survival and for the next collective leap for the country. The University of the West Indies offers several culturally specific AI-related short courses explicitly designed around flexible, targeted professional development and lifelong learning.

Beyond UWI, the range of free online learning from other major universities is now remarkable. Some examples include The University of Helsinki, Harvard University, MIT OpenCourseWare and The Open University’s OpenLearn platform. There is also Youtube which offers thousands of free videos regarding how to use several AI tools and, more importantly, how to monetise AI. So the worker, the teacher, the student, the entrepreneur, and the public servant can all begin learning the language of the new world.

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Lloyd Waller is Professor of Digital Transformation Policy and Governance and Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies